| → different bird-like animals, 1872 |
| kinds of birds, 1860 1861 1866 1869 |
|
| ↑ 1 blocks not present in 1859 1860 1872; present in 1861 1866 1869 |
| Notwithstanding that the number of joints shown in the fossil impressions correspond
with the number in the several toes of living birds' feet, some authors doubt whether the animals which left the
impressions were really birds.
|
|
| → beds. 1861 1866 1869 1872 |
| beds. Notwithstanding that the number of joints shown in the fossil impressions correspond with the number in the several toes of living birds feet, some authors doubt whether the animals which left the impressions were really birds. 1860 |
|
|
any tertiary stratum; but now extinct species have been discovered in India, South America, and in
as far back as the
stage. Had it not been for the rare accident of the preservation of footsteps in the new red sandstone of the United States, who would have ventured to suppose
no less than at least thirty
→different bird-like animals,
some of gigantic size, existed during that period? ↑
Not a fragment of bone has been discovered in these
→beds. Not long ago, palæontologists maintained that the whole class of birds came suddenly into existence during the eocene period; but now we know, on the authority of Professor Owen, that a bird certainly lived during the deposition of the upper greensand; and still more recently, that strange bird, the Archeopteryx, with a long lizard-like tail, bearing a pair of feathers on each joint, and with its wings furnished with two free claws, has been discovered in the oolitic slates of Solenhofen. Hardly any recent discovery shows more forcibly than this, how little we as yet know of the former inhabitants of the world. |
|
| I may give another instance,
from having passed under my own
has much struck me. In a memoir on Fossil Sessile Cirripedes, I
stated that, from the
of existing and extinct tertiary species; from the extraordinary abundance of the individuals of many species all over the world, from the Arctic regions to the equator, inhabiting various zones of depths from the upper tidal limits to 50 fathoms; from the perfect manner in which specimens are
in the oldest tertiary beds; from the ease with which even a fragment of a valve can be recognised; from all these circumstances, I inferred
had sessile cirripedes existed during the secondary periods, they would certainly have been preserved and discovered; and as not one species had
discovered in beds of this age, I concluded that this great group had been suddenly developed at the commencement of the tertiary series. This was a sore trouble to me, adding as I
one more instance of the abrupt appearance of a great group of species. But my work had hardly been published, when a skilful palæontologist, M. Bosquet, sent me a drawing of a perfect specimen of an unmistakeable sessile cirripede, which he had himself extracted from the chalk of Belgium. And, as if to make the case as striking as possible, this
cirripede was a Chthamalus, a very common, large, and ubiquitous genus, of which not one
has as yet been found even in any tertiary stratum. Still more recently, a Pyrgoma, a member of a distinct sub-family of sessile cirripedes, has been discovered by Mr. Woodward in the upper chalk; so that we now
|
