Page:Creation by Evolution (1928).djvu/309

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIRD

If the explanation that I have given above is true we should be justified in believing that the oldest known bird, called Archaeopteryx (Fig. 1), which is known to us by two

Fig. 2.

“Archaeopteryx was considerably smaller than a crow, with a stout little head armed with sharp teeth (as scarce as hen’s teeth was no joke in that distant period). While he fluttered through the air he trailed after him a tail longer than his body, beset with feathers on each side. Everyone knows that nowadays the feathers of a bird’s tail are arranged like the sticks of a fan and that the tail opens and shuts like a fan. But in Archaeopteryx the feathers were arranged in pairs, a feather on each side of every joint of the tail, so that on a small scale the tail was something like that of a kite; and because of this long, lizard-like tail this bird and his immediate kith and kin are placed in a group Saururae, or lizard-tailed.”—Lucas.

fossil skeletons, one in the British Museum, and the other in Berlin, is intermediate between the reptiles and the modern birds in its structure. Archaeopteryx, a queer lizard tailed bird, was found in rocks at Solenhofen, in Bavaria, which are in age nearer to the first rocks in which we find remains of ordinary birds than the rocks that were being laid down at the time when the change from reptile to bird began. We should therefore expect to find, and we do find, that it is nearer in structure to ordinary birds than to the reptiles. It has, for example, fully developed feathers, but it is in many ways a distinctly intermediate form. The hind foot,

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