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Fossil Birds
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2016
Extract
Rozier says, in his ‘Journal de Physique,’ 1782, page 174, that “mention is made in the Catalogue of Davila of a tibia and of a beak imprinted on two different stones.” If there be any other notice in Davila than the passages we have quoted, it has escaped our search.
In 1782, M. Robert de Paul de Lamanon gave, in the Abbé Rozier's ‘Journal de Physique’ (vol. xx. p. 174), an excellent summary of what was then known of Ornithic fossils. After noticing the accounts in Albertus Magnus and other old authors, he goes onto say in his ‘Description de Divers Fossiles trouvés dans les carrières de Montmartre, près Paris, et vues générales sur la formation des Pierres gypseuses,' “M. Rouelle, according to M. Darcet, found in the plaster quarries of Montmartre parts of a bird separated one from the other. I(Lamanon) have seen also in the Cabinet of Natural History of Bordeaux, some bones that it has been attempted to refer to birds; they were found by the Abbé Desbiey in the quarries of Léognan, which are at two leagues from this capital. We can only assert, however, that these isolated bones may have belonged to birds, on the ground that their medullary cavity is very large relatively to their thickness.
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References
page no 11 note * In the Abbé Rozier’s ‘Journal de Physique,’ March, 1782, p. 174 et seq.
page no 12 note * Further details from Rozier and the figure from his Plate will be given in the stratigranhical considerations with the other gypsum fossils.
page no 13 note * Phil. Trans., vol. lxxvi., 1786, p. 451.
page no 13 note † Mr. Dexter Marsh, however, in a letter to Professor Silliman, in 1848, says, “You will recollect that the first specimen of fossil footprints of birds ever brought into public notice in this country (United States) was the slab I discovered among the flagging-stone, while laying the flagging-stone near my house, which Dr. Deane first described to President Hitchcock as the footprints of birds,”—from which statement it would seem that Mr. Marsh claims to be the first to notice these impressions, and Professor Hitchcock adds, in conversation with Mr. Wilson, “I understood him to claim the discovery.” (Ainer. Journal Science, vol. vi. new ser. p. 272.)
page no 14 note * This account and the bibliography is taken in the main from Hitchcock’s ‘Report on the Sandstone of the Connecticut Valley, especially its Fowl Footmarks.’ Boston, 1858.
page no 19 note * In a footnote Mr. Dennis states that he has “found them iu the jaw, a thick stern with a few straight branches between the fangs of the teeth.”
page no 22 note * In a footnote, Mr. Dennis says he has observed something like this crossing in the skulls of some birds and iu the bone-plates of the Armadillo.
page no 22 note † Such are the familiar characteristics of the known Pterodactyle bones from the Chalk and Jurassic strata.—Ed. Geol.