Odontornithes is 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 .
7-597: In 1875 Marsh divided this "subclass" into Odontolcae , with the teeth standing in grooves, and Odontotormae , with the teeth in separate alveoles or sockets. In his 1880 work, Odontornithes: A monograph on the extinct toothed birds of North America , he added the Sauriurae , represented by Archaeopteryx , as a third order. The resulting classification was paraphyletic , not accurately resolving evolutionary relationships, and so it has been abandoned by most modern scientists, though at least one 21st century paper re-used
14-558: A gull or petrel . However, they were 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. This prehistoric bird article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Sauriurae Sauriurae (meaning "lizard tails" in Greek )
21-430: Is a now-deprecated subclass of birds created by Ernst Haeckel in 1866. It was intended to include Archaeopteryx and distinguish it from all other birds then known, which he grouped in the sister-group Ornithurae ("bird tails"). The distinction Haeckel referred to in this name is that Archaeopteryx possesses a long, reptile-like tail, while all other birds known to him had short tails with few vertebrae, fused at
28-466: The concept under the older name Odontoholomorphae (first coined by Stejneger, 1885). Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire stated in 1821 that he had found a considerable number of tooth buds in the upper and lower jaws of the Palaeornis torquatus ( rose-ringed parakeet ). Émile Blanchard felt justified in recognizing flakes of dentine . However, M. Braun and especially P. Fraisse showed later that
35-530: The end into a pygostyle . The unit was not much referred to, and when Hans Friedrich Gadow in 1893 erected Archaeornithes for basically the same fossils, this became the common name for the early reptile -like grade of birds. Ji Qiang and Larry Martin have continued to refer to the Sauriurae as a valid natural group. However, researchers like Jacques Gauthier (2001) and Julia Clarke (2002) have found that fossils found after Haeckel's time have bridged
42-412: The horny sheath. Occasionally calcification occurs in or around these papillae, as it does regularly in the egg tooth of the embryos of all birds. The best known of the "Odontornithes" are Hesperornis regalis , standing about 3 ft. high, the somewhat taller H. crassipes , and Ichthyornis dispar . Hesperornis looked somewhat similar to a loon , while Ichthyornis was quite similar to
49-406: The structures in question are of the same kind as the well-known serrated "teeth" of the bill of anserine birds. In fact the papillae observed in the embryonic birds are the soft cutaneous extensions into the surrounding horny sheath of the bill , comparable to the well-known nutritive papillae in a horse's hoof . They are easily exposed in the well-macerated under jaw of a parrot, after removal of
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