103 
dromeoides. The tibia of the Dinornis ingens’ indicates that species to have attained 
the height of nine feet. 
Comparison of the bones of the feet of the Dinornis with the American Ornithichnites. 
In 1836 Prof. Hitchcock* published his remarkable discovery of impressions in the 
New Red Sandstone of the valley of the river Connecticut, Massachusetts, which he con- 
ceived to be the foot-prints of birds, the largest belonging to a species with three toes, 
surpassing the Ostrich in size. The epoch of these impressions is as ancient as that of 
the Cheirotheria or Labyrinthodont footsteps in Europe, and more ancient than those of 
the oolites and lias, from which the remains of our most extraordinary extinct reptiles 
have been obtained: but no fossil bones of birds have been found associated with the 
Labyrinthodont and Thecodont reptiles, nor with those of the lias or oolites, the Ptero- 
dactyles of which were once mistaken for birds. ‘The Wealden is the oldest formation in 
which true ornitholithes have hitherto been discovered. The ancient foot-prints of the 
Connecticut sandstones were for the most part supposed to be those of Gralle ; but the 
high geological antiquity of those sandstones, and the inferences which might be deduced 
from the low character of the air-breathing animal creation, as indicated by fossil bones, 
of the condition of the atmosphere during the deposition of the oolites, lias and new 
red sandstones, led me to express a doubt in my report on British Fossil Reptiles 
whether foot-prints alone were adequate to support the inference that the animals that 
impressed them actually possessed the highly-developed respiratory organization of a 
bird of flight’. One could hardly in fact venture to reconstruct in imagination the 
stupendous bird which, on Dr. Hitchcock’s hypothesis, must have left the impressions 
called Ornithichnites giganteus ; for, before 1843, the only described relic of the extinct 
New Zealand bird did not warrant the supposition of a species larger than the Ostrich’. 
The species of Dinornis, in fact, to which that relic belonged, we now know not to 
have exceeded seven feet in height, which is the average stature of the Ostrich. But 
the bones of the Dinornis giganteus subsequently acquired demonstrate the existence, 
at a comparatively recent period, of a bird whose tridactyle foot-prints, as will be pre- 
sently shown, surpassed the Ornithichnites giganteus of Prof, Hitchcock. 
The length of this foot-print from its hind part to the extremity of the impression 
of the claw of the middle toe is sixteen inches; the breadth of the hind part is four 
inches six lines. The toes were broad and thick, and we may plainly discern that the 
bird supported itself, like the Ostrich, upon the under surface of the toes, from their 
extremities to the cushion beneath the distal end of the proximal phalanges ; and that 
in making the impression, the foot did not quite sink as far as the end of the metatarsal 
bone. 
| Pl, XXX, fig. 4. 2 American Journal of Science and Arts, vol. xxix. No. 2. 
3 Report on British Fossil Reptiles, Part II., Trans. British Association, 1841, p. 203. 
+ Zoological Proceedings, November 1839, p. 170. 
