MUSEUM OF NATURE

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31530, 18 November 1967, Page 16

MUSEUM OF NATURE

Rare Bird With False Teeth

(Contributed by the Canterbury Museum > There is a further instalment in the continuing story of the “toothed” fossil bird from Motunau. Four years ago a Canterbury school teacher, Miss H. D. Adams, found on Motunau beach a slab of siltstone with bones projecting from its surface. She brought it to the Canterbury Museum and removal of some of the rock disclosed a skull with bony tooth-like projections on the jaws. It seemed similar to the skull of a giant fossil bird which had been found in California. The five-million-year-old bones of the New Zealand bird are at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History where Dr Hildegarde Howard is writing a paper describing them for publication in the Records of the Canterbury Museum. Dr Howard, on first examining the bones, thought that the bird was best included in the genus Osteodontornis (literally meaning bird with bony teeth) which she had established in 1957 for the Californian fossil bird. After further very detailed work she has decided to place it in Pseudodontornis (meaning bird with false teeth). The story of the discovery of these birds with bony “teeth” really starts in the 1870 s when some 50-million-year-old bones were found embedded in the London clay on the island of Sheppey at the mouth of the Thames. They were brought to the British Museum and Richard Owen, first describer of the moa, named them Odontopteryx (meaning tooth wing). The second specimen of a bony-toothed bird was brought to Germany in 1905 by a Brazilian sailor. This fossil skull was acquired by the Zoological Institute at Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad in the U.S.S.R.), and. being recognised as very similar to the English bird, was placed in Owen’s genus Odontopteryx The annoying thing is that noone knows where the sailor found the fossil and we have no idea how old it is. In 1930, a German authority on fossil birds, Professor Kalman Lambrecht, studied the skull more closely and gave it the new name Pseudodontornis. There the position rested until the 1950 s when a beautifully preserved third specimen of a bony-toothed bird was found in a flagstone quarry in California. Even some impressions of feathers were found. This twenty-mil-lion-year-old fossil was given its own name. Osteodontornis,

by Dr Howard. Two further Californian specimens of Osteodontornis have since been found. A twenty-million-year-old fragment of a “toothed” jaw has been recently found in South Carolina and is very similar to the Pseudodontornis skull at Kaliningrad. Dr Howard has decided that our Motunau bird is best placed with Pseudodontornis but it is a new species distinct from that obtained from the Brazilian sailor. She intends naming it in honour'of the late Professor Ruben Stirton, of the University of California, who first recognised the true nature of the fossil. So this whole group of

birds, the Odontopterygia, has the following sparse membership: the fossil Odontopteryx from England of which only one specimen is known; the Californian Osteodontornis of which three specimens are known, all placed in the same species; and Pseudodontornis. This last genu; is known from three specimens: I that of the Brazilian sailor and the one from South Carolina are placed in one species; and a new species will be set up for the bones found by Miss Adams on Motunau beach.—D.R.G. The photograph shows Dr Howard with the five million-year-old fossil skull of the “toothed” bird from Motunau beach.