Too Big to Walk. Brian J. Ford
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himself was an enthusiastic investigator of fossilized plants, it is surprising to me that he showed little interest in dinosaurs. Yet within two years of his book appearing, a discovery was made that seemed to provide the perfect example of evolutionary theory. This was the discovery in Germany of what seemed to be a creature halfway between reptile and bird – Archæopteryx. The skeletons and feathers have been excavated from the limestone quarries that surround Solnhofen, Germany. First to appear was a lone feather, found in 1860 by Christian Hermann von Meyer and now on display at the Humboldt Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin (see footnote here). Nobody can be certain it came from Archæopteryx, and it may belong to a similar (but different) genus, but the following year a skeleton was found in the same limestone at a quarry in Langenaltheim, 5 miles (8 km) west of Solnhofen. It was donated to a local physician, Karl Häberlein, in lieu of his professional fees. Knowing of the interest in palæontology then spreading across England, Häberlein sold it to the British Museum (Natural History) for the princely sum of £700 (today worth about £45,000 or $52,000). This has long been known as the London Specimen, and it is on display at the Natural History Museum to this day. The skeleton is mostly complete, though it lacks much of the skull and cervical vertebræ. In 1863 Richard Owen formally named it Archæopteryx macrura, admitting that it might not be the same species as the one from which the feather found by von Meyer had originated. Darwin was pleased by the find, for it fitted so well with the theories in his book. In the fourth edition, he added a note:
Now we know, on the authority of professor Owen, that a bird certainly lived during the deposition of the upper greensand; and still more recently, that strange bird, the Archæopteryx, with a long lizard-like tail, bearing a pair of feathers on each joint, and with its wings furnished with two free claws, has been discovered in the oolitic slates of Solnhofen. Hardly any recent discovery shows more forcibly than this how little we as yet know of the former inhabitants of the world.
It was many decades before further specimens of Archæopteryx were unearthed. The Eichstätt specimen was discovered in 1951 near Workerszell, Germany, and was not formally described until 1974, when details were published by Peter Wellnhofer. The fossil is on display at the Jura Museum in Eichstätt, Germany, and is of a curiously diminutive form. It has been suggested that it may be a different genus, and has been given the alternative name of Jurapteryx. The jury is still out on that. More typical of the type is the Maxberg specimen, which was discovered in Germany in 1956 and described in 1959. It was owned by a collector, Eduard Opitsch, who loaned it for exhibition in the Maxberg Museum in Solnhofen. When Opitsch died in 1991 and his estate was catalogued, that fine fossil had vanished. To this day, nobody knows what happened to it. Another fossil from Solnhofen, which had been discovered in 1972, was identified after being classified as an example of Compsognathus. This one too is the subject of debate, and some authorities want to classify it as Wellnhoferia, a cousin to Archæopteryx. A further example known as the Munich Specimen was unearthed in August 1992 by quarryman Jürgen Hüttinger who was working for the Solenhofer Aktien-Verein in the limestone quarries of Langenaltheim. Hüttinger duly reported his find to the quarry manager, who again called in Wellnhofer, the specialist palæontologist. The fossil was in fragments, and it was painstakingly reassembled in the State Paläontology Collection workshops. Only then was it realized that the skeleton was almost complete, apart from a single wing-tip. A methodical search through a ton of the nearby strata eventually brought it to light, and a near-perfect skeleton was the result. In April 1993, the finished specimen was formally presented to the press in Solnhofen, and it was put on public exhibition during the 150th anniversary of the Bavarian State Collection in Munich. It then went to the U.S. in 1997, where the Chicago Field Museum in Chicago displayed it as ‘Archæopteryx – the bird that rocked the world’, as part of the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Eventually, it ended up in Munich’s Paläontologisches Museum, who paid 2 million Deutschmark for the fossil (now almost £1 million or $1.3 million).
Of all the specimens of Archæopteryx, this is the only one with a skull. It was found in 1874 by a farmer named Jakob Niemeyer, who sold it to an innkeeper, Johann Dörr, to decorate his bar. It is now in the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin.
The best specimen of them all has a mysterious beginning. It was the property of a collector in Switzerland, whose wife – after his death in 2001 – offered it for sale to the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. They lacked the funds to purchase it until Burkhard Pohl, who founded the Wyoming Dinosaur Center (WDC) in Thermopolis, put them in contact with an anonymous benefactor who came up with the funds. It was put on public display in Frankfurt, and then in 2007 was transferred to Wyoming. German palæontologists were horrified, and began a protest petition. Although no law had been broken by the export of the fossil, it would be unavailable for easy access by German investigators, and would also be passing from a state museum in Frankfurt to a privately owned collection in Wyoming. The directors of the WDC formally issued a statement, saying that the specimen would at all times be freely available for scholarship and study, which mollified the protestors and peace was resumed. This, now known as the Thermopolis Specimen, shows a perfectly preserved skeleton and has been expertly curated. It also retains voluminous sprays of feathers on the body and the wings, and is believed to be the most vivid and perfectly preserved of them all. It has become a key item of evidence in the continuing debate about whether Archæopteryx was truly the first bird or was closer to the dinosaur end of the evolutionary spectrum. It was described in 2005 as having ‘theropod features’ because of the angle of one of its toes; mentioning a connection with meat-eating dinosaurs is a great way to attract maximum attention. Yet nobody knows where it was originally found.18
This specimen was subsequently named Archæopteryx siemensii, and it is not only the best of them all, but is the only one on display outside Europe. It resides in America, and in that sense it is unique.
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