EEB386H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Transitional Fossil, Coelophysis, Common Raven
14 Feb 2017
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Lived in victorian era (contemporary of darwin"s) Ro was sent a 15 cm bone from new zealand. Saw that fragment had unusual structure: surface was clearly not mammalian even though it was big (mammal-sized) Had access to a lot of comparative specimens in museum: looked at bones of other animals and didn"t look like anything else. Made inference from one fragment of bone: so far as a judgement can be , ro inferred that the bone was from something like an ostrich, suggested that there had been some large birds that had gone extinct. Box arrived with a lot of bird bones. Bones reconstructed into complete structure of moa. But ro had already figured out that extinct birds like the ostrich (moa) were running around. Owen looked at bones and figured out that if had bones of certain size it would probably be from large walking bird that had certain characteristics like flightless-ness.
