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Fig. 1.—The earliest known bird, Archæopteryx macrura, Upper Jurassic, Solenhofen, Bavaria. (Restoration by Heilmann.)
“The earliest bird known, although obviously a bird, with wings and feathers, differs in many ways from modern birds. It has large teeth; its tail was not a fan, but a double row of feathers on either side of a long pointed axis of a bone; and most remarkable of all, it had on its wings, besides feathers, three separately movable fingers ending in claws, by whose aid it doubtless scrambled about through the branches. In all these ways it was less fully adapted to aerial life than are modern birds.”—Julian S. Huxley.
