Palace Gardens Research Articles

IV.—Note on Remains of the Emu from the Wellington Caves, New South Wales

A few bones of birds are recorded by Mr. Gerard Krefft as having been found in association with the remains of the extinct mammalia, which abound in the breccias of the caves and fissures in the limestone rocks of the Wellington Valley, New South Wales. The bird bones belong to various genera and species, but only those of the Emu seem, as yet, to have been identified, and these were in the possession of the late Rev. W. Branthwaite Clarke. They do not appear to have been described, nor is the number of fragments in the collection stated. Unfortunately Mr. Clarke's valuable collection was deposited for exhibition in the “Palace Garden,” a temporary building erected for the Intercolonial Exhibition at Sydney in 1879–80, and was consumed in the disastrous fire which destroyed the building and its contents soon after its close; and, as regards Mr. Clarke's specimens, the destruction of the material evidence on which the early appearance of the Emu in Australia was founded. However, there is preserved in the palæontological collections in the British Museum, South Kensington, a portion of a shin bone, that I discovered some years ago in a collection of fragmentary remains from the Wellington caves, presented to the National Collection by the Trustees of the Australian Museum, Sydney. The specimen is the distal end of a right tibia, somewhat mutilated, but is interesting as being additional evidence, still existing, of the Emu having been contemporary with the great extinct Marsupials; as such, and on account of the rarity of its remains, I have thought it worthy of a short notice. Compared with the tibia of an adult Emu (Dromaius Novœ-Hollandiœ), it is indistinguishable from it, but has belonged to a larger individual, as shown by the annexed few measurements, in inches and tenths.

Longevity of the Carp

LAST autumn, being at Fontainebleau, I was told by the servant of the Palace there that the German soldiers while in occupation of the place during the last war caught many of the carp in the pond of the Palace garden called “Jardin Anglais,” and that some of these carp carried, attached by silver wire to their gills, little silver plates bearing inscriptions purporting that the plates were attached to the fish in the time of Francis I. and Henry II.—i.e. about 300 years ago.