THE TRILOBITE.
Among the earliest races we have those remarkable forms, the Trilobites, inhabiting the ancient ocean. These crustacea remotely resemble the common wood-louse, and like that animal they had the power of rolling themselves into a ball when attacked by an enemy. The eye of the trilobite is a most remarkable organ; and in that of one species, Phacops caudatus, not less than 250 lenses have been discovered. This remarkable optical instrument indicates that these creatures lived under similar conditions to those which surround the crustacea of the present day.—Hunt’s Poetry of Science.
PROFITABLE SCIENCE.
In that strip of reddish colour which runs along the cliffs of Suffolk, and is called the Redcrag, immense quantities of cetacean remains have been found. Four different kinds of whales, little inferior in size to the whalebone whale, have left their bones in this vast charnel-house. In 1840, a singularly perplexing fossil was brought to Professor Owen from this Redcrag. No one could say what it was. He determined it to be the tooth of a cetacean, a unique specimen. Now the remains of cetaceans in the Suffolk crag have been discovered in such enormous quantities, that many thousands a-year are made by converting them into manure.
EXTINCT GIGANTIC BIRDS OF NEW ZEALAND.
In the islands of New Zealand have been found the bones of large extinct wingless Birds, belonging to the Post Tertiary or Recent system, which have been deposited by the action of rivers. The bird is named Moa by the natives, and Dinornis by naturalists: some of the bones have been found in two caves in the North Island, and have been sold by the natives at an extraordinary price. The caves occur in limestone rocks, and the bones are found beneath earth and a soft deposit of carbonate of lime. The largest of the birds is stated to have stood thirteen or fourteen feet, or twice the height of the ostrich; and its egg large enough to fill the hat of a man as a cup. Several statements have appeared of these birds being still in existence, but there is every reason to believe the Moa to be altogether extinct.
An extensive collection of remains of these great wingless birds has been collected in New Zealand by Mr. Walter Mantell, and deposited in the British Museum. Among these bones Professor Owen has discovered a species which he regards as the most remarkable of the feathered class for its prodigious strength and massive proportions, and which he names Dinornis elephantopus, or elephant-footed, of which the Professor has been able to construct an entire lower limb: the length of the metatarsal bone is 9¼ inches, the breadth of the lower end being 5-1/3 inches. The extraordinary proportions of the metatarsus of this wingless bird will, however, be still better understood by comparison with the same bone in the ostrich, in which the metatarsus is 19 inches in length, the breadth of its lower end being only 2½ inches. From the materials accumulated by Mr. Mantell, the entire skeleton of the Dinornis elephantopus has been reconstructed; and now forms a worthy companion of the Megatherium and Mastodon in the gallery of fossil remains in the British Museum. This species of Dinornis appears to have been restricted to the Middle Island of New Zealand.[36]
Another specimen of the remains of the Dinornis is preserved in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, in Lincoln’s-Inn Fields; and the means by which the college obtained this valuable acquisition is thus graphically narrated by Mr. Samuel Warren, F.R.S.:
In the year 1839, Professor Owen was sitting alone in his study, when a shabbily-dressed man made his appearance, announcing that he had got a great curiosity, which he had brought from New Zealand, and wished to dispose of to him. It had the appearance of an old marrow-bone, about six inches in length, and rather more than two inches in thickness, with both extremities broken off; and Professor Owen considered that, to whatever animal it might have belonged, the fragment must have lain in the earth for centuries. At first he considered this same marrow-bone to have belonged to an ox, at all events to a quadruped; for the wall or rim of the bone was six times as thick as the bone of any bird, even of the ostrich. He compared it with the bones in the skeleton of an ox, a horse, a camel, a tapir, and every quadruped apparently possessing a bone of that size and configuration; but it corresponded with none. On this he very narrowly examined the surface of the bony rim, and at length became satisfied that this fragment must have belonged to a bird!—to one at least as large as an ostrich, but of a totally different species; and consequently one never before heard of, as an ostrich was by far the biggest bird known.
From the difference in the strength of the bone, the ostrich being unable to fly, so must have been unable this unknown bird; and so our anatomist came to the conclusion that this old shapeless bone indicated the former existence in New Zealand of some huge bird, at least as great as an ostrich, but of a far heavier and more sluggish kind. Professor Owen was confident of the validity of his conclusions, but would communicate that confidence to no one else; and notwithstanding attempts to dissuade him from committing his views to the public, he printed his deductions in the Transactions of the Zoological Society for 1839, where fortunately they remain on record as conclusive evidence of the fact of his having then made this guess, so to speak, in the dark. He caused the bone, however, to be engraved; and having sent a hundred copies of the engraving to New Zealand, in the hope of their being distributed and leading to interesting results, he patiently waited for three years,—viz. till the year 1842,—when he received intelligence from Dr. Buckland, at Oxford, that a great box, just arrived from New Zealand, consigned to himself, was on its way, unopened, to Professor Owen, who found it filled with bones, palpably of a bird, one of which bones was three feet in length, and much more than double the size of any bone in the ostrich!
And out of the contents of this box the Professor was positively enabled to articulate almost the entire skeleton of a huge wingless bird between TEN and ELEVEN feet in height, its bony structure in strict conformity with the fragment in question; and that skeleton may at any time be seen at the Museum of the College of Surgeons, towering over, and nearly twice the height of, the skeleton of an ostrich; and at its feet lying the old bone from which alone consummate anatomical science had deduced such an astounding reality,—the existence of an enormous extinct creature of the bird kind, in an island where previously no bird had been known to exist larger than a pheasant or a common fowl!—Lecture on the Moral and Intellectual Development of the present Age.[37]