Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/402

388 surpasses, or even equals, this Jurassic limestone of Bavaria in this respect, and therefore the lithographers of the whole earth receive their lithographic stones from the quarries of Solenhofen. We may obtain an idea of the exceptional and uniform way in which this limestone has been deposited when we see the impressions and casts of jelly-fish and other delicate animals, which are found as fossils in this stone and in no other known deposit.

In this lithographic stone of Bavaria there was found, in the



year 1860, the impression of a feather. This proved the existence of a bird during the Jurassic period—that is, of a feathered animal much older than all other known fossil birds. It was therefore named Archæopteryx, which means "old wing." The feather was there; a sharp lookout was kept now for the bird itself, and, indeed, one year later, a nearly complete skeleton of it was found. It was bought by the British Museum, in London, for fourteen thousand marks, and has been described by Prof. Owen, Sixteen years later, in 1877, a second specimen was discovered in Solenhofen. The electrician, Dr. Siemens, in Berlin, did not wish that this fossil should also go out of Germany; therefore he bought it for twenty thousand marks, and sold it afterward, at the same price, to the Prussian Government. It is now in the Berlin Museum.

Both specimens together furnish us with an almost complete picture of the Jurassic bird. The Archæopteryx was about the size of a pigeon. The Berlin specimen proves that its bill was also provided with teeth. Furthermore, the vertebrae show also that biconcave form, as in Ichthyornis and in lower animals. But there are a number of other features in the Archæopteryx which remove it still further from the birds of the present time, and make it resemble a reptile: 1. Its wing bones were not grown together in the way of all the other birds, but they were partially