The sternum of the turkey, if we have it practically complete, is one of the most characteristic bones of the skeleton; but Professor Marsh had no such material to guide him when he pronounced upon his fossil turkeys. Had I made new species, based on the fragments of fossil long bones of all that I have had for examination, quite a numerous little extinct avifauna would have been created.
"It is often a positive detriment to science, in my opinion, to create new species of fossil birds upon the distal ends of long bones, and surely no assistance whatever to those who honestly endeavor to gain some idea of the avian species that really existed during prehistoric times."[8]
[CHAPTER IV]
THE TURKEY HISTORIC
Having disposed of such records as we have of the extinct ancestors of the American turkeys—the so-to-speak meleagrine records—we can now pass to what is, comparatively speaking, the modern history of these famous birds, although some of this history is already several centuries old.
We have seen in the foregoing chapter that all the described fossil species of turkeys have been restricted to the genus Meleagris, and this is likewise the case with the existing species and subspecies. Right here I may say that the word Meleagris is Greek as well as Latin, and means a guinea-fowl. This is due to the fact that when turkeys were first described and written about they were, by several authors of the early times, strangely mixed up with those African forms, and the two were not entirely disentangled for some time, as we shall see further on in this chapter. In modern ornithology, however, the generic name of Meleagris has been transferred from the guinea-fowls to the turkeys. These last, as they are classified in "The A. O. U. Check-List of the American Ornithologists' Union," which is the latest authoritative word upon the subject, stand as follows:
Family Meleagridæ. Turkeys.
Genus Meleagris Linnæus.
Meleagris Linnæus, Syst. Nat., ed. 10, 1, 1758, 156. Type, by subs, desig., Meleagris gallopavo Linnæus (Gray, 1840).
Meleagris gallopavo (Linnæus).
Range.—Eastern and south central United States, west to Arizona and south to the mountains of Oaxaca.
a. [Meleagris gallopavo gallopavo. Extralimital.]
b. Meleagris gallopavo silvestris Vieillot. Wild Turkey [310a].
Meleagris silvestris Vieillot Nouv., Dict. d'Hist. Nat., IX, 1817, 447.
Range.—Eastern United States from Nebraska, Kansas, western Oklahoma, and eastern Texas east to central Pennsylvania, and south to the Gulf coast; formerly north to South Dakota, southern Ontario, and southern Maine.
c. Meleagris gallopavo merriami Nelson. Merriam's Turkey [310].
Meleagris gallopavo merriami Nelson, Auk, XVII, April, 1900, 120.
(47 miles southwest of Winslow, Arizona.)
Range.—Transition and Upper Sonoran zones in the mountains of southern Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, western Texas, northern Sonora, and Chihuahua.
d. Meleagris gallopavo osceola Scott. Florida Turkey [310b].
Meleagris gallopavo osceola Scott, Auk, VII, Oct., 1890, 376. (Tarpon Springs, Florida.)
Range.—Southern Florida.
e. Meleagris gallopavo intermedia Sennett. Rio Grande Turkey [310c].
Meleagris gallopavo intermedia Sennett. Bull. U. S. Geol. & Geog. Surv. Terr., V, No. 3, Nov., 1879, 428. (Lomita, Texas.)
Range.—Middle northern Texas south to northeastern Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas.
The presenting of the above list here does away with giving, in the history of the wild turkeys, any of the very numerous changes that have taken place through the ages which led up to its adoption. The discussion of these changes, as a part of meleagrine history, would make an octavo volume of two hundred pages or more.