On the fossil remains of birds collected in New Zealand by Walter Mantell, Esq., of Wellington / by Gideon Algernon Mantell.

  • Mantell, Gideon Algernon, 1790-1852.
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the fossil remains of birds collected in New Zealand by Walter Mantell, Esq., of Wellington / by Gideon Algernon Mantell. 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.

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    this interesting subject; but until 1846, when he resigned an official situation, he was unable to follow up his inquiries with success. In the meanwhile the collections of the Rev. W. Williams, Mr. Percy Earl, and of other gentlemen, had furnished the materials from which Professor Owen drew up his two celebrated memoirs on the Dinornis, an extinct genus of tridactyle Struthious Birds, which were pub- lished in the third volume of the Transactions of the Zoological So- ciety. In 1846, and the commencement of 1847, my son explored every known locality of these relics in the North Island within his reach, and went into the interior of the country and located with the natives, for the purpose of collecting specimens of the then unknown parts of the skeletons, and of ascertaining whether any of these gigantic birds were still in existence; resolving, if there appeared to be even a re- mote chance of this being the case, to penetrate farther into the interior and obtain one alive. The information he gathered from the natives offered no encouragement to follow up the pursuit, at least in that part of the country, but tended to confirm the idea that the gigantic struthious birds had become extinct, the last of the race having, like the Dodo, been destroyed by man within a comparatively recent period ; and that if any of the species whose bones are found in a fossil state are still living, it is probable they will be those of small size, and related to the Apteryx, the living diminutive repre- sentative of the colossal bipeds that once trod the soil of New Zea- land. With these introductory remarks, which appeared to me necessary to place the history of the discovery in a clear point of view, I pro- pose, first, to notice the geological conditions under which these fossil bones appear to have been accumulated ; secondly, to describe in general terms the most remarkable features of the collection before us ; and lastly, to offer some observations on the bearing of these facts on that difficult problem, that “ mystery of mysteriesas it has been emphatically termed by Sir John Herschel, the appearance and extinction of certain types of organic beings on the surface of the globe. I. Geological position of the deposits in which the bones occur.—In attempting to arrive at a correct knowledge of the relative geological age of the deposit in which the bones sent to this country were found imbedded, I have experienced considerable difficulty, in consequence of the unsettled state of the orthography of the various localities, and also from the indefinite manner in which the collectors describe the places whence they obtained the specimens. Unfortunately the letter from my son containing details of this nature, and to which in his subsequent correspondence he refers me for the necessary information, has not reached me. I endeavoured to mark on a map of New Zealand all the localities whence bones had been obtained, but several places mentioned by the collectors are not inserted. I will therefore briefly state the circumstances under which the bones are described as occurring by the gentlemen who have transmitted them to this country. s 2