On portions of a cranium and a jaw in the slab containing the fossil remains of the Archaeopteryx / by John Evans.

  • Evans, John, 1823-1908.
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On portions of a cranium and a jaw in the slab containing the fossil remains of the Archaeopteryx / by John Evans. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    15/18 (page 13)
    offer no opinion as to the method of their attachment. It is of course contrary to all our existing notions to suppose that a jaw such as this, armed with teeth, could belong to a creature so truly bird-like in most respects as the Archae- opteryx ; but assuming it to be that of a fish—and it has many analogies with the jaws of some species of fish—or of some other animal accidentally deposited in the very midst of the remains of that singular creature, it appears to me that, fragmentary as it is, its characters are sufficiently defined for any one well versed in the fossils of the Solenhofen slate to come forward and identify it. Up to the present time, however, I have not heard of any one having been able to do so, and certainly the jaws and teeth of the Lepidotous and Pholidophorous fishes from the same beds, such as I have been able to examine, all differ from this in some more or less important particulars. It appears to me also, that the teeth and jaw on the Archae- opteryx slab are rather slighter in structure than those of fishes of corresponding size, though this is a point on which I would by no means insist. Looking at the usual dispersion of the fossils in the Solenhofen slates, looking also at the general rule (to which, however, there are some exceptions) that the fossils in it are found singly, so that all the remains of a reptile or a fish upon a single slab may usually be assigned with some degree of confidence to a single individual, the chances against a single extraneous jaw being mixed up with the remains of the Archaeopteryx, without any other bones of the animal to which the jaw belonged being also present, are great indeed. But how enormously are the chances against such an occur- rence increased if the jaw thus accidentally present is that of a species of fish or reptile hitherto unknown ! In order to obtain information from the best possible source, as to whether the jaw and teeth were of a character well known to those acquainted with the Solenhofen fossils, I prepared a careful drawing of it and placed it in the hands of my lamented friend, the late Dr. Falconer, who kindly wrote to the illustrious Hermann von Meyer upon the subject. The following is a translated extract from his answer (dated