The Aeronauts of the Solenhofen Age

Abstract

At least seven geological ages ago, and there were aeronauts in those days. Not Glaishers and Coxwells, clinging to bubbles of gas at six miles high, but reptiles and birds,—the latter at least, and perhaps the former, capable of long and lofty flights. On the red sands of Connecticut, perhaps some two or three ages before, wingless birds had left their footprints; but nor bone nor feather has the searching eye of man yet looked upon to glean a notion of what those birds were like. Not from all the thick mass of stratified rocks deposited by lake or ocean in the long interval between the period of those impressed tracks—persistent through 2000 feet of stone—to the time when a solitary bone was entombed in the sandy mud of the Cretaceous Sea.A little time ago the geological and palæontological worlds were astonished by the announcement of a feathered reptile. We recorded the reports without comment; the reason was, we could not rightly reconcile the statements to our conscientious content. We endeavoured to procure drawings, but without success; the specimen was for sale, and no doubt its value would have been prejudiced by its portraits being handed about as “cartes de visite” in the houses of the learned. The accounts that reached us were second-hand and by hearsay. Professor Wagner, on his death-bed, wrote the notice in the ‘Sitzungberichte’ of Munich, from the description of a M. Witte, who had derived his information from a sight of the specimen in M. Häberlein's possession.