The Cretaceous Birds of New Jersey
Storrs L. Olson and David C. Parris[1]
[1] Storrs L. Olson, Department of Vertebrate Zoology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20560. David C. Parris, New Jersey State Museum, 205 West State Street, Trenton, New Jersey 08625-0530.
Introduction
Fossils of Cretaceous birds are scarce and usually difficult to interpret. The better known forms such as Hesperornis and Ichthyornis belong to strange and archaic groups having little or nothing to do with the modern avian radiation. The only areas that have yielded Cretaceous birds of essentially modern aspect in sufficient quantities to be regarded as avifaunal assemblages are the inland deposits of the Lance Formation and strata of similar age in Wyoming (Brodkorb, 1963a) and the marine deposits of New Jersey. Of these, the assemblage from New Jersey is the more diverse.
Fossil birds were described from the Cretaceous greensands of southern New Jersey over a century ago by Marsh (1870, 1872). These have been carried, largely uncritically, in lists and compilations ever since (e.g. Hay, 1902; Lambrecht, 1933; Rapp, 1943; Miller, 1955; Brodkorb, 1963b, 1967). Although some of these specimens were subsequently re-examined and their status altered (Shufeldt, 1915; Cracraft, 1972, 1973), there has been no modern comprehensive revision of all of the avian taxa that have been named from the Cretaceous of New Jersey. In recent years, additional fossil birds have been recovered from these deposits that add further to our knowledge of late Mesozoic avifaunas, making a review of this material all the more desirable.
In spite of the relative diversity of the New Jersey Cretaceous avifauna, the total number of specimens is still small. The decline of the glauconite greensand industry and the difficulty of recovering small fossils have contributed to this paucity of specimens. The glauconite industry is now confined to a single operation, the Inversand Company in Sewell, Mantua Township, Gloucester County, New Jersey. Fortunately, the late owner of the company, Mr. Churchill Hungerford, Jr., generously allowed fossils to be recovered on his property by the New Jersey State Museum, which houses most of the newly discovered specimens, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia being the repository of the rest. Another specimen came from a locality in Upper Freehold Township, Monmouth County, New Jersey and was donated to the New Jersey State Museum by Gerard R. Case.
Acknowledgments.—We gratefully acknowledge the late Churchill Hungerford, Jr., for permitting fossil material to be recovered from his property by the New Jersey State Museum (NJSM). We are much indebted to John H. Ostrom, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University (YPM), and Gay Vostreys and Charles Smart of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (ANSP) for their patience in lending types and other material from their collections for a very extended period. Pat V. Rich, Monash University, assisted Parris in the early stages of this study. Comparative material of Presbyornis was obtained from the collection of the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP), the University of Wyoming (UW), and the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution (USNM). The photographs are by Victor E. Krantz, Smithsonian Institution. For valuable comments on the manuscript we are grateful to Donald Baird, Princeton University, and Jonathan Becker, Smithsonian Institution.
The Fossil Localities and Their Stratigraphy
The extensive deposits of Cretaceous age in eastern North America have been widely studied for over 150 years. These generally poorly consolidated sediments have provided valuable resources, notably glauconite, fire clay, and chalk. As the publications by Morton (1829), Vanuxem (1829), Conrad (1869), and other early authors showed, the sediments are also quite fossiliferous.