CHAPTER V. Discovery of the Pterodactyle

DISCOVERY OF THE PTERODACTYLE

Late in the eighteenth century, in 1784, a small fossil animal with wings began to be known through the writings of Collini, as found in the white lithographic limestone of Solenhofen in Bavaria, and was regarded by him as a former inhabitant of the sea. The foremost naturalist of the time, the citizen Cuvier--for it was in the days of the French Republic--in 1801, in lucid language, interpreted the animal as a genus of Saurians. That word, so familiar at the present day, was used in the first half of the century to include Lizards and Crocodiles; and described animals akin to reptiles which were manifestly related neither to Serpents nor Turtles. But the term saurian is no longer in favour, and has faded from science, and is interesting only in ancient history of progress. The lizards soon became classed in close alliance with snakes. And the crocodiles, with the Hatteria, were united with chelonians. Most modern naturalists who use the term saurian still make it an equivalent of lizard, or an animal of the lizard kind.

CUVIER

The remains are preserved with the neck arched over the back, and the jaws opened upward]

Cuvier defined this fossil from Solenhofen as distinguished by the extreme elongation of the fourth digit of the hand, and from that character invented for the animal the name Pterodactyle. He tells us that its flight was not due to prolongation of the ribs, as among the living lizards named Dragons; or to a wing formed without the digits being distinguishable from each other, as among Birds; nor with only one digit free from the wing, as among Bats; but by having the wing supported mainly by a single greatly elongated digit, while all the others are short and terminate in claws. Cuvier described the amazing animal in detail, part by part; and such has been the influence of his clear words and fame as a great anatomist that nearly every writer in after-years, in French and in English, repeated Cuvier's conclusion, maintained to the end, that the animal is a saurian.

Reconstructed from the scattered bones in Fig. 14, showing the limbs on the left side]

Long before fashion determined, as an article of educated belief, that fossil animals exist chiefly to bridge over the gaps between those which still survive, the scientific men of Germany were inclined to see in the Pterodactyle such an intermediate type of life. At first Soemmerring and Wagler would have placed the Pterodactyle between mammals and birds.

GOLDFUSS

Showing positions of the wing membranes with the animal at rest]

But the accomplished naturalist Goldfuss, who described another fine skeleton of a Pterodactyle in 1831, saw in this flying animal an indication of the course taken by Nature in changing the reptilian organisation to that of birds and mammals. It is the first flash of light on a dark problem, and its brilliance of inference has never been equalled. Its effects were seen when Prince Charles Bonaparte, the eminent ornithologist, in Italy, suggested for the group the name Ornithosauria; when the profound anatomist de Blainville, in France, placed the short-tailed animal in a class between Reptiles and Birds named Pterodactylia; and Andreas Wagner, of Munich, who had more Pterodactyles to judge from than his predecessors, saw in the fossil animal a saurian in transition to a bird.

VON MEYER

But the German interpretation is not uniform, and Hermann von Meyer, the banker-naturalist of Frankfurt a./M., who made himself conversant with all that his predecessors knew, and enlarged knowledge of the Pterodactyles on the most critical facts of structure, continued to regard them as true reptiles, but flying reptiles. Such is the influence of von Meyer that all parts of the world have shown a disposition to reflect his opinions, especially as they practically coincide with the earlier teaching of Cuvier. Owen and Huxley in England, Cope and Marsh in America, Gaudry in France, and Zittel in Germany have all placed the Pterodactyles as flying reptiles. Their judgment is emphatic. But there is weight of competent opinion to endorse the evolutionary teaching of Goldfuss that they rise above reptiles. To form an independent opinion the modern student must examine the animals, weigh their characters bone by bone, familiarise himself, if possible, with some of the rocks in which they are found; to comprehend the conditions under which the fossils are preserved, which have added not a little to the interest in Pterodactyles, and to the difficulty of interpretation.

GEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF PTERODACTYLES IN GERMANY

We may briefly recapitulate the geological history. Those remains of Ornithosaurs which have been mentioned, with a multitude of others which are the glory of the museums of Munich, Stuttgart, Tuebingen, Heidelberg, Bonn, Haarlem, and London, have all been found in working the lithographic stone of Bavaria. The whitish yellow limestone forms low, flat-topped hills, now isolated from each other by natural denudation, which has removed the intervening rock. The stone is found at some distance north of the Danube, in a line due north of Augsburg, in the country about Pappenheim, and especially at the villages of Solenhofen, Eichstaedt, Kelheim, and Nusplingen. These beds belong to the rocks which are named White Jura limestone in Germany, which is of about the same geological age as the Kimeridge clay in England. Much of it divides into very thin layers, and in these planes of separation the fossils are found. They include the Ammonites lithographicus and a multitude of marine shells, king crabs and other Crustacea, sea-urchins, and other fossils, showing that the deposit was formed in the sea. The preservation of jelly-fish, which so soon disappear when left dry on the beach, shows that the ancient calcareous mud had unusual power of preserving fossils. Into this sea, with its fishes great and small, came land plants from off the land, dragonflies and other insects, tortoises and lizards, Pterodactyles with their flying organs, and birds still clothed with feathers. Sometimes the wing membranes of the flying reptiles are found fully stretched by the wing finger, as in examples to be seen at Munich and in the Yale Museum in Newhaven, in America. At Haarlem there is an example in which the wing membrane appears to be folded much as in the wing of a Bat, when the animal hangs suspended, with the flying membrane bent into a few wide undulations.

The Solenhofen Slate belongs to about the middle period of the history of flying reptiles, for they range through the Secondary epochs of geological time. Remains are recorded in Germany from the Keuper beds at the top of the Trias, which is the bottom division of the Secondary strata; and I believe I have seen fragments of their bones from the somewhat older Muschelkalk of Germany.

THEIR HISTORY IN ENGLAND

In England the remains are found for the first time in the Lower Lias of Lyme Regis, in Dorset, and the Upper Lias of Whitby, in Yorkshire. In Wuertemberg they occur on the same horizons. They reappear in England, in every subsequent age, when the conditions of the strata and their fossils give evidence of near proximity to land. In the Stonesfield Slate of Stonesfield, in Oxfordshire, the bones are found isolated, but indicate animals of some size, though not so large as the rare bones of reputed true birds which appear to have left their remains in the same deposit.

At least two Pterodactyles are found in the Oxford clay, known from more or less fragmentary remains or isolated bones; just as they occur in the Kimeridge Clay, Purbeck Limestone, Wealden sandstones, and especially in newer Secondary rocks, named Gault, Upper Greensand, and Chalk, in the south-east of England.

Owing to exceptional facilities for collecting, in consequence of the Cambridge Greensand being excavated for the valuable mineral phosphate of lime it contains, more than a thousand bones are preserved, more or less broken and battered, in the Woodwardian Museum of the University of Cambridge alone. To give some idea of their abundance, it may be stated that they were mostly gathered during two or three years, as a matter of business, by an intelligent foreman of washers of the nodules of phosphate of lime, which, in commerce, are named coprolites. He soon learned to distinguish Pterodactyle bones from other fossils by their texture, and learned the anatomical names of bones from specimens in the University Museum. This workman, Mr. Pond, employed by Mr. William Farren, brought together not only the best of the remains at Cambridge, but most of those in the museums at York and in London, and the thousands of less perfect specimens in public and private collections which passed through the present writer's hands in endeavours to secure for the University useful illustrations of the animal's structure. These fragments, among which there are few entire bones, are valuable, for they have afforded opportunities of examining the articular ends of bones in every aspect, which is not possible when similar organic remains are embedded in rock in their natural connexions.

In England Flying Reptiles disappear with the Chalk. In that period they were widely distributed, being found in Bohemia, in Brazil, and Kansas in the United States, as well as in Kent and other parts of England. They attained their largest dimensions in this period of geological time. One imperfect fragment of a bone from the Laramie rocks of Canada was described, I believe, by Cope, though not identified by him as Ornithosaurian, and is probably newer than other remains.

ASPECT OF PTERODACTYLES

If this series of animals could all be brought together they would vary greatly in aspect and stature, as well as in structure. Some have the head enormously long, in others it is large and deep, characters which are shared by extinct reptiles which do not fly, and to which some birds may approximate; while in a few the head is small and compact, no more conspicuous, relatively, than the head of a Sparrow. The neck may be slender like that of a Heron, or strong like that of an Eagle; the back is always short, and the tail may be inconspicuous, or as long as the back and neck together. These flying reptiles frequently have the proportions of the limbs similar to those of a Bat, with fore legs strong and hind legs relatively small; while in some the limbs are as long, proportionately, and graceful as those of a Deer. With these differences in proportions of the body are associated great differences in the relative length of the wing and spread of the wing membranes.

DIMENSIONS OF THE ANIMALS

The dimensions of the animals have probably varied in all periods of geological time. The smallest, in the Lithographic Slate, are smaller than Sparrows, while associated with them are others in which the drumstick bone of the leg is eight inches long. In the Cambridge Greensand and Chalk imperfect specimens occur, showing that the upper arm bones are larger than those of an Ox. The shaft is one and a half inches in diameter and the ends three inches wide. Such remains may indicate Pterodactyles not inferior in size to the extinct Moas of New Zealand, but with immensely larger heads, animals far larger than birds of flight.

The late Sir Richard Owen, on first seeing these fragmentary remains, said "the flying reptile with outstretched pinions must have appeared like the soaring Roc of Arabian romance, but with the features of leathern wings with crooked claws superinduced, and gaping mouth with threatening teeth." Eventually we shall obtain more exact ideas of their aspect, when the structures of the several regions of the body have been examined. The great dimensions of the stretch of wing, often computed at twenty feet in the larger examples, might lead to expectations of great weight of body, if it were not known that an albatross, with wings spreading eleven feet, only weighs about seventeen pounds.