Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/401

Rh means "fish-bird." The fossil remains from which Hesperornis and Ichthyornis have been described are exhibited in the Museum of Yale College, in New Haven.

A long time, a whole geological period, before Hesperornis and Ichthyornis were enjoying life and eating fish on the vast Cretaceous ocean of the western United States, there was on the other side of the Atlantic, at about the site of the town of Solenhofen, in Bavaria, a lake or marine gulf in a protected situation, with very quiet waters. The lime carried by the rivers into this gulf was deposited at the bottom, in an exceedingly uniform and undisturbed manner, as a very fine sediment. At present, after millions of years, the gulf is dried up and the sediment has been hardened to a limestone, the grain of which is unusually small and regular. In fact, no limestone in any country