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Updated: May 26, 2025
Yet had such a slow mode of origin, as Darwinians contend for, operated exclusively in all cases, it is absolutely incredible that birds, bats, and pterodactyles should have left the remains they have, and yet not a single relic be preserved in any one instance of any of these different forms of wing in their incipient and relatively imperfect functional condition!
The breast bone was large and keeled, as in most birds and in bats, and the shoulder girdle is strikingly similar to that of ordinary birds. All other known pterodactyles have teeth lodged in sockets.
This excavation was composed of several hundred divisions of all sizes and shapes. It might be called a hive with numberless ranges of cells, capriciously arranged, but a hive on a vast scale, and which, instead of bees, might have lodged all the ichthyosauri, megatheriums, and pterodactyles of the geological epoch.
These are the Pterosauria, or Pterodactyles, the remains of which are met with throughout the series of Mesozoic rocks, from the lias to the chalk, and some of which attained a great size, their wings having a span of eighteen or twenty feet.
I should digress from my subject if I were to examine here how the organization of animals is developed upon the earth; what modifications, or more strictly speaking, what complications it has undergone after each cataclysm, or if I even stopped to describe one of those ancient epochs during which the earth, the sea, and the atmosphere had for inhabitants cold-blooded reptiles of enormous dimensions; tortoises with shells three feet in diameter; lizards seventeen mètres long; pterodactyles, veritable flying dragons of such strange forms, that they might be classed on good grounds either among reptiles, among mammiferous animals, or among birds.
That merely minute, indefinite variations in all directions should unaided have independently built up the shoulder structure of the pterodactyles and carinate birds, and have laterally depressed their optic lobes, at a time so far back as the deposition of the Oolite strata, is a coincidence of the highest improbability; but that an innate power and evolutionary law, aided by the corrective action of "Natural Selection," should have furnished like needs with like aids, is not at all improbable.
The breast-bone was large and keeled, as in most birds and in bats, and the shoulder girdle is strikingly similar to that of ordinary birds. All other known pterodactyles have teeth lodged in sockets.
These are the Pterosauria, or Pterodactyles, the remains of which are met with throughout the series of Mesozoic rocks, from the lias to the chalk, and some of which attained a great size, their wings having a span of eighteen or twenty feet.
It was concluded by general reasoning that this finger had the office of supporting a web which extended between it and the body. An existing specimen proves that such was really the case, and that the pterodactyles were devoid of feathers, but that the fingers supported a vast web like that of a bat's wing; in fact, there can be no doubt that this ancient reptile flew after the fashion of a bat.
It has been suggested to me that this difficulty may be evaded by considering pterodactyles and carinate birds as independent branches from one side of an ancient common trunk, while similarly the Dinosauria and struthious birds are taken to be independent branches from the other side of the same common trunk; the two kinds of birds resembling each other so much on account of their later development from that trunk as compared with the development of the reptilian forms.
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