“Great long teeth,” said his friend. “I suppose, Perry, in all the history of fossil discoveries in the rocks, one of the greatest events was the day when the first bird was discovered in a rock in Bavaria which was being quarried for lithograph stone. That rock is made from a fine kind of mud, which was laid down in the Jurassic Period. One of the very first birds in the world had evidently got stuck in that mud, hundreds of thousands of years ago, and although he had struggled to get away, he was stuck fast. He had drowned and died there.
“Then, day by day, week by week, the mud settled around him, until finally it reached his body and his head, and entombed him absolutely. The mud must have been coming down quite fast, for all his body was covered even before the feathers had rotted. For years and years, for centuries and centuries, mud had been deposited on top of him, thousands and tens of thousands of years had put other rock strata above the mud and then, in a later age, there had been a rising of the earth and it was all dry land once more.
“Still more hundreds of thousands of years passed, and then Man came. A workman, digging out stone, saw this dead bird, even the marks of his feathers on the stone. Even then, no one could believe it was really a bird, and the jaw, which was lying a few feet away from the marks of the feathers, was thought to be the jaw of a fish.
“Some day, perhaps, Perry, you may be lucky enough to find one still earlier! Think of a Triassic reptile heralding a bird! That would be a triumph, for there must have been some small leaping dinosaur which gave signs of bird-like development. Just think, Perry, if you should be the one to make the grand discovery!”
“It would be great,” cried the boy.
“That’s the excitement of paleontology,” went on the other, enthusiastically. “You’ve read of the gold-fever, and how men will spend their lives alone in the mountains, hunting for nuggets. Then, when they find them, the gold is just like all the rest of the gold in the world. But when we find something new, it’s something that no human eye has ever seen before, it’s the gateway into a new world. Any day, if we were on an expedition among Triassic rocks, we might find the bird that lived before the Archæopteryx and learn for the first time exactly how the birds first came to be.”
“There aren’t any birds living to-day that are like those old primitive ones, are there, Antoine?”
“Not really alike,” the other answered, “because those early birds were still half reptiles. For example, the Archæopteryx had a long tail like a lizard, with a feather on each side of each joint. Then, too, he had claws on the joints of his wings. Now, there is still one bird living that has claws on the end of its wings when young, and climbs around the trees with them before it learns to fly. That’s the—”
“Hold on!” cried Perry. “I’ll tell you the name. Wait a bit!” He thought hard. “It’s the—the—Hoactzin, isn’t it?”
“Right, right,” said Antoine, “you have read your books well. The first birds were not highly developed, and probably they were not as good flyers as the flying lizards. Most likely they only took short flights. Still, the future was theirs, for they were built upon a better plan.”