Odontornithes: A Monograph on the Extinct Toothed Birds of North America

Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880. First edition.. The cloth on the rear cover has a few faint spots, the four outer corners are a bit worn and frayed, some of the cloth hinges on the folding plates are foxed, a tight copy in very good condition.. Pp. xv, 201, 34 fine tinted lithographic plates – some are large and folding. Publisher’s original green cloth, front and rear boards are blind stamped with border lines, spine is lettered in gilt and with gilt emblem of the U. S. Army, lg 4to. United States Geological Exploration 40th Parallel, volome VII. The volume has been expertly rebacked with the original spine cloth laid down on the spine. Odontornithes is today an obsolete and disused taxonomic term proposed by Othniel Charles Marsh for birds possessing teeth, notably the genera Hesperornis and Ichthyornis from the Cretaceous deposits of Kansas. The best known of these species are Hesperornis regalis, standing about 3 ft. high, the somewhat taller H. crassipes, and Ichthyornis dispar. Hesperornis looked somewhat like a loon, while Ichthyornis was quite similar to a gull or petrel. These unique fossil birds were an entirely distinct groups of birds and merely shared with modern birds some distant ancestry in the Early Cretaceous. The Hesperornis lineage may have derived even sooner or possibly independently from the ancestors of modern birds (modified after Wiki). From the research collection of herpetologist Lauren E. Brown with his signature on the front endpaper.