Dragons of the Air Part 4

IMPORTANCE OF THE BRAIN AND BREATHING ORGANS

So far as the evidence goes, it appears that these fossil flying animals show no substantial differences from birds, either in the mould of the brain or the impress of the breathing organs upon the bones. These approximations to birds of the nervous and respiratory systems, which are beyond question two of the most important of the vital organs of an animal, and distinctive beyond all others of birds, place the naturalist in a singular dilemma. He must elect whether he will trust his interpretation to the soft organs, which among existing animals never vary their type in the great cla.s.ses of vertebrate animals, and on which the animal is defined as something distinct from its envelope the skeleton and its appendages the limbs, or whether he will ignore them.

The answer must choose substantially between belief that the existing order of Nature gives warrant for believing that these vital characteristics which have been discussed might equally coexist with the skeleton of a mammal or a reptile, as with that of a bird, for which there is no particle of evidence in existing life. Or, as an alternative, the fact must be accepted that birds only have such vital organs as are here found, and therefore the skeleton, that may be a.s.sociated with them, cannot affect the reference of the type to the same division of the animal kingdom as birds. The decision need not be made without further consideration. But brain and breathing organs of the avian type are structures of a different order of stability in most animals from the bones, which vary to a remarkable extent in almost every ordinal group of animals.

TEMPERATURE OF THE BLOOD

The organs of circulation and digestion are necessarily unknown. There are reasons why the blood may have been hot, such as the evidences from the wings of exceptional activity; though the temperature depends more upon the amount of blood in the body than upon the apparatus by which it is distributed. We speak of a Crocodile as cold-blooded, yet it is an animal with a four-chambered heart not incomparable with that of a bird. On the other hand, the Tunny, a sort of giant Mackerel, is a fish with a three-chambered heart, only breathing the air dissolved in water, which has blood as warm as a mammal, its temperature being compared to that of a pig. Several fishes have blood as warm as that of Manis, the scaly ant-eater; and many birds have hotter blood than mammals. The term "hot-blooded," as distinct from "cold-blooded," applied to animals, is relative to the arbitrary human standard of experience, and expresses no more than the circ.u.mstance that mammals and birds are warmer animals than reptiles and fishes.

The exceptional temperature of the Flying Fish has led to a vague impression that physical activity and its effect upon the amount of blood which vigour of movement circulates, are more important in raising an animal's temperature than possession of the circulatory organs commonly a.s.sociated with hot blood, which drive the blood in distinct courses through the body and breathing organs. Yet the kind of heart which is always a.s.sociated with vital structures such as Pterodactyles are inferred to have possessed from the brain mould and the pneumatic foramina in the bones, is the four-chambered heart of the bird and the mammal. Considering these organs alone--of which the fossil bones yield evidence--we might antic.i.p.ate, by the law of known a.s.sociation of structures, that nothing distinctly reptilian existed in the other soft part of the vital organisation, because there is no evidence in favour of or against such a possibility.

CHAPTER VIII

THE PLAN OF THE SKELETON

While these animals are incontestably nearer to birds than to any other animals in their plan of organisation, thus far no proof has been found that they are birds, or can be included in the same division of vertebrate life with feathered animals. It is one of the oldest and soundest teachings of Linnaeus that a bird is known by its feathers; and the record is a blank as to any covering to the skin in Pterodactyles.

There is the strongest probability against feathers having existed such as are known in the Archaeopteryx, because every Solenhofen Ornithosaur appears to have the body devoid of visible or preservable covering, while the two birds known from the Solenhofen Slate deposit are well clothed with feathers in perfect preservation. We turn from the skin to the skeleton.

The plan on which the skeleton is constructed remains as evidence of the animal's place in nature, which is capable of affording demonstration on which absolute reliance would have been placed, if the brain and pneumatic foramina had remained undiscovered. With the entire skeleton before us, it is inconceivable that anatomical science should fail to discover the true nature of the animal to which it belonged, by the method of comparing one animal with another. There is no lack of this kind of evidence of Pterodactyles in the three or four scores of skeletons, and thousands of isolated or a.s.sociated bones, preserved in the public museums of Europe and America.

I may recall the circ.u.mstance that the discovery of skeletons of fossil animals has occasionally followed upon the interpretation of a single fragment, from which the animal has been well defined, and sometimes accurately drawn, before it was ever seen. So I propose, before drawing any conclusions from the skeletons in the entirety of their construction, to examine them bone by bone, and region by region, for evidence that will manifest the nature of this brood of Dragons. Their living kindred, and perhaps their extinct allies, a.s.sembled as a jury, may be able to determine whether resemblances exist between them, and whether such similarity between the bones as exists is a common inheritance, or is a common acquisition due to similar ways of life, and no evidence of the grade of the organism among vertebrate animals.

The bones of these Ornithosaurs, when found isolated, first have to be separated from the organisms with which they are a.s.sociated and mixed in the geological strata. This discrimination is accomplished in the first instance by means of the texture of the surface. The density and polish of the bones is even more marked than in the bones of birds, and is usually a.s.sociated with a peculiar thinness of substance of the bone, which is comparable to the condition in a bird, though usually a little stouter, so that the bones resist crus.h.i.+ng better. Pterodactyle bones in many instances are recognised by their straightness and comparatively uniform dimensions, due to the exceptional number of long bones which enter into the structure of the wing as compared with birds. When the bones are unerringly determined as Ornithosaurian, they are placed side by side with all the bones which are most like them, till, judged by the standard of the structures of living animals, the fossil is found to show a composite construction as though it were not one animal but many, while its individual bones often show equally composite characters, as though parts of the corresponding bone in several animals had been cunningly fitted together and moulded into shape.

THE PLAN OF THE HEAD IN ORNITHOSAURS

The head is always the most instructive part of an animal. It is less than an inch long in the small Solenhofen skeleton named _Pterodactylus brevirostris_, and is said to be three feet nine inches long in the toothless Pterodactyle Ornithostoma from the Chalk of Kansas. Most of these animals have a long, slender, conical form of head, tapering to the point like the beak of a Heron, forming a long triangle when seen from above or from the side. Sometimes the head is depressed in front, with the beak flattened or rounded as in a Duck or Goose, and occasionally in some Wealden and Greensand species the jaws are truncated in front in a ma.s.sive snout quite unlike any bird. The back of the head is sometimes rounded as among birds, showing a smooth pear-shaped posterior convexity in the region of the brain. Sometimes the back of the head is square and vertical or oblique. Occasionally a great crest of cellular tissue is extended backward from above the brain case over the spines of the neck bones.

There are always from two to four lateral openings in the skull. First, the nostril is nearest to the extremity of the beak. Secondly, the orbits of the eyes are placed far backward. These two openings are always present. The nostril may incline upward. The orbits of the eyes are usually lateral, though their upper borders sometimes closely approximate, as in the woodp.e.c.k.e.r-like types from the Solenhofen Slate named _Pterodactylus Kochi_, now separated as another genus. In most genera there is an opening in the side of the head, between the eye hole and the nostril, known as the antorbital vacuity; and another opening, which is variable in size and known as the temporal vacuity, is placed behind the eye. The former is common in the skulls of birds, the latter is absent from all birds and found in many reptiles.

The palate is usually imperfectly seen, but English and American specimens have shown that it has much in common with the palate in birds, though it varies greatly in form of the bones in representatives from the Lias, Oolites, and Cretaceous rocks.

From the scientific aspect the relative size of the head, its form, and the positions and dimensions of its apertures and processes, are of little importance in comparison with its plan of construction, as evidenced by the positions and relations to each other of the bones of which it is formed. There usually is some difficulty in stating the limits of the bones of the skull, because in Pterodactyles, as among birds, they usually blend together, so that in the adult animal the sutures between the bones are commonly obliterated.

Bones have relations to each other and places in the head which can only change as the organs with which they are a.s.sociated change their positions. No matter what the position of a nostril may be--at the extremity of a long snout, as in an ant-eater, or far back at the top of the head in a porpoise, or at the side of the head in a bird--it is always bordered by substantially the same bones, which vary in length and size with the changing place of the nostril and the form of the head. Every region of the head is defined by this method of construction; so that eye holes and nose holes, brain case and jaw bones, palate and teeth, beak, and back of the skull are all instructive to those who seek out the life-history of these animals. We may briefly examine the head of an Ornithosaurian.

BONES ABOUT THE NOSTRIL

No matter what its form may be, the head of an Ornithosaur always terminates in front in a single bone called the intermaxillary. It sends a bar of bone backward above the visible nostrils, between them; and a bar on each side forms the margin of the jaw in which teeth are implanted. The bone varies in depth, length, sharpness, bluntness, slenderness, and ma.s.siveness. As the bone becomes long the jaw is compressed from side to side, and the openings of the nostrils are removed backward to an increasing distance from the extremity of the beak.

The outer and hinder border of the nostril is made by another bone named the maxillary bone, which is usually much shorter than the premaxillary.

It contains the hindermost teeth, which rarely differ from those in front, except in sometimes being smaller.

The nasal bones, which always make the upper and hinder border of the nostrils, meet each other above them, in the middle line of the beak.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 20

Showing that the extremity of the jaws in Rhamphorhynchus was sheathed in horn as in the giant Kingfisher, since the jaws similarly gape in front.

The hyoid bones are below the lower jaw in the Pterodactyle.]

The nostrils are unusually large in the Lias genus named Dimorphodon, and small in species of the genus Rhamphorhynchus from Solenhofen. Such differences result from the relative dimensions and proportions of these three bones which margin the nasal vacuity, and by varying growth of their front margins or of their hinder margins govern the form of the snout.

The jaws are most ma.s.sive in the genera known from the Wealden beds to the Chalk. The palatal surface is commonly flat or convex, and often marked by an elevated median ridge which corresponds to a groove in the lower jaw, though the median ridge sometimes divides the palate into two parallel concave channels. The jaw is margined with teeth which are rarely fewer than ten or more than twenty on each side. They are sharp, compressed from side to side, curved inward, and never have a saw-like edge on the back and front margins. No teeth occur upon the bones of the palate.

In most birds there is a large vacuity in the side of the head between the nostril and the orbit of the eye, partly separated from it by the bone which carries the duct for tears named the lachrymal bone. The same preorbital vacuity is present in all long-tailed Pterodactyles, though it is either less completely defined or absent in the group with short tails. It affords excellent distinctive characters for defining the genera. In the long-tailed genus Scaphognathus from Solenhofen this preorbital opening is much larger than the nostril, while in Dimorphodon these vacuities are of about equal size. Rhamphorhynchus is distinguished by the small size of the antorbital vacuity, which is placed lower than the nostril on the side of the face. The aperture is always imperfectly defined in Pterodactylus, and is a relatively small vacuity compared with the long nostril. In Ptenodracon the antorbital vacuity appears to have no existence separate from the nostril which adjoins the eye hole. And so far as is known at present there is no lateral opening in advance of the eye in the skull in any Ornithosaur from Cretaceous rocks, though the toothless Ornithostoma is the only genus with the skull complete. When a separate antorbital vacuity exists, it is bordered by the maxillary bone in front, and by the malar bone behind. The prefrontal bone is at its upper angle. That bone is known in a separate state in reptiles and, I think, in monotreme mammals. Its ident.i.ty is soon lost in the mammal, and its function in the skull is different from the corresponding bone in Pterodactyles.

BONES ABOUT THE EYES

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 21. UPPER SURFACE OF SKULL OF THE HERON

Compared with the same aspect of the skull of Rhamphorhynchus]

The third opening in the side of the head, counting from before backward, is the orbit of the eye. In this vacuity is often seen the sclerotic circle of overlapping bones formed in the external membrane of the eye, like those in nocturnal birds and some reptiles. The eye hole varies in form from an inverted pear-shape to an oblique or transverse oval, or a nearly circular outline. It is margined by the frontal bone above; the tear bone or lachrymal, and the malar or cheek bone in front; while the bones behind appear to be the quadrato-jugal and post-frontal bones, though the bones about the eye are somewhat differently arranged in different genera.

The eyes were frequently, if not always, in contact with the anterior walls of the brain case, as in many birds, and are always far back in the side of the head. In Dimorphodon they are in front of the articulation of the lower jaw; in Rhamphorhynchus, above that articulation; while in Ornithostoma they are behind the articulation for the jaw. This change is governed by the position of the quadrate bone, which is vertical in the Lias genus, inclined obliquely forward in the fossils from the Oolites, and so much inclined in the Chalk fossil that the small orbit is thrown relatively further back.

Thus far the chief difference in the Pterodactyle skull from that of a bird is in the way in which the malar arch is prolonged backward on each side. It is a slender bar of bone in birds, without contributing ascending processes to border vacuities in the side of the face, while in these fossil animals the lateral openings are partly separated by the ascending processes of these bones. This divergence from birds, in the malar bone entering the orbit of the eye is approximated to among reptiles and mammals, though the conditions, and perhaps the presence of a bone like the post-orbital bone, are paralleled only among Reptiles.

The Pterodactyles differ among themselves enough for the head to make a near approach to Reptiles in Dimorphodon, and to Birds in Pterodactylus. In the Ground Hornbill and the s...o...b..ll the lachrymal bones in front of the orbits of the eyes grow down to meet the malar bars without uniting with them. The post-frontal region also is prolonged downward almost as far as the malar bar, as though to show that a bird might have its...o...b..tal circle formed in the same way and by the same bones as in Pterodactylus. Cretaceous Ornithosaurs sometimes differ from birds apparently in admitting the quadrato-jugal bone into the orbit. It then becomes an expanded plate, instead of a slender bar as in all birds.

THE TEMPORAL FOSSA

A fourth vacuity is known as the temporal fossa. When the skull of such a mammal as a Rabbit, or Sheep, is seen from above, there is a vacuity behind the orbits for the eyes, which in life is occupied by the muscles which work the lower jaw. It is made by the malar bone extending from the back of the orbit and the process of bone, called the zygomatic process, extending forward from the articulation of the jaw, which arches out to meet the malar bone.

In birds there is no conspicuous temporal fossa, because the malar bar is a slender rod of bone in a line with the lower end of the quadrate bone.

Reptile skulls have sometimes one temporal vacuity on each side, as among tortoises, formed by a single lateral bar. These vacuities, which correspond to those of mammals in position, are seen from the top of the head, as lateral vacuities behind the orbits of the eyes, and are termed superior temporal vacuities. In addition to these there is often in other reptiles a lateral opening behind the eye, termed the inferior temporal vacuity, seen in Crocodiles, in Hatteria, and in Lizards; and in such skulls there are two temporal bars seen in side view, distinguished as superior and inferior. The superior arch always includes the squamosal bone, which is at the back of the single bar in mammals. The lower arch includes the malar bone, which is in front in the single arch of mammals. The circ.u.mstance that both these arches are connected with the quadrate bone makes the double temporal arch eminently reptilian.

In Ornithosaurs the lateral temporal vacuity varies from a typically reptilian condition to one which, without becoming avian, approaches the bird type. In skulls from the Lias, Dimorphodon and Campylognathus, there is a close parallel to the living New Zealand reptile Hatteria, in the vertical position of the quadrate bone and in the large size of the vacuity behind and below the eye, which extends nearly the height of the skull. In the species of the genus Pterodactylus, the forward inclination of the quadrate bone recalls the Curlew, Snipe, and other birds. The back of the head is rounded, and the squamosal bone, which appears to enter into the wall of the brain case as in birds and mammals, is produced more outward than in birds, but less than in mammals, so as to contribute a little to the arch which is in the position of the post-frontal bone of reptiles. It is triangular, and stretches from the outer angle of the frontal bone at the back of the orbit to the squamosal behind, where it also meets the quadrate bone.

Its third lower branch meets the quadratojugal, which rests upon the front of the quadrate bone, as in Iguanodon, and is unlike Dimorphodon in its connexions. In that genus the supra-temporal bone, or post-orbital bone, appears to rest upon the post-frontal and connect it with the quadrato-jugal. In Dimorphodon the malar bone is entirely removed from the quadrate, but in Pterodactylus it meets its articular end. Between the post-frontal bone above and the quadrato-jugal bone below is a small lunate opening, which represents the lateral temporal vacuity; and so far, this is a reptilian character. But if the thin post-frontal bone were absorbed, Pterodactylus would resemble birds.

There is no evidence that the quadrate bone is free in any Ornithosaurs, as it is in all birds, while in Dimorphodon it unites by suture with the squamosal bone. In Ornithostoma the lateral temporal vacuity is little more than a slit between the quadrate bone below, the quadrato-jugal in front, and what may be the post-frontal bone behind (see Fig. 2, p. 12).

BONES ABOUT THE BRAIN

The bones containing the brain appear to be the same as form the brain case in birds. The form of the back of the skull varies in two ways.

First it may be flat above and flat at the back, when the back of the head appears to be square. This condition is seen in all the long-tailed genera, such as Campylognathus from the Lias and Rhamphorhynchus, and is a.s.sociated with a high position for the upper temporal bar. Secondly, the back of the head may be rounded convexly, both above and behind.

That condition is seen in the short-tailed genera, such as Pterodactylus. But in the large Cretaceous types, such as Ornithocheirus and Ornithostoma, the superior longitudinal ridge which runs back in the middle line of the face becomes elevated and compressed from side to side at the back of the head as a narrow deep crest, prolonged backward over the neck vertebrae for some inches of length. All these three types are paralleled more or less in birds which have the back of the head square like the Heron, or rounded like the Woodp.e.c.k.e.r; or crested, though the crest of the Cormorant is not quite identical with Ornithocheirus, being a distinct bone at the back of the head in the bird which never blends with the skull. In so far as the crest is reptilian it suggests the remarkable crest of the Chameleon. In the structure of the back of the skull the bones are a modification of the reptilian type of Hatteria in the Lias genus Campylognathus, but the reptilian characters appear to be lost in the less perfectly preserved skulls of Cretaceous genera.

The palate is well known in the chief groups of Ornithosaurs, such as Campylognathus, Scaphognathus, and Cycnorhamphus.