By his kindness, I am
enabled to place before you a restoration of one of these extraordinary
birds, every part of which can be thoroughly justified by the more or
less complete skeletons, in a very perfect state of preservation, which
he has discovered. This _Hesperornis_ (Fig. 3), which measured between
five and six feet in length, is astonishingly like our existing divers
or grebes in a great many respects; so like them indeed that, had the
skeleton of _Hesperornis_ been found in a museum without its skull, it
probably would have been placed in the same group of birds as the divers
and grebes of the present day.[1]
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--HESPERORNIS REGALIS (Marsh).]
But _Hesperornis_ differs from all existing birds, and so far resembles
reptiles, in one important particular--it is provided with teeth. The
long jaws are armed with teeth which have curved crowns and thick roots
(Fig. 4), and are not set in distinct sockets, but are lodged in a
groove. In possessing true teeth, the _Hesperornis_ differs from every
existing bird, and from every bird yet discovered in the tertiary
formations, the tooth-like serrations of the jaws in the _Odontopteryx_
of the London clay being mere processes of the bony substance of the
jaws, and not teeth in the proper sense of the word.
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