page_title: Specimens of Archaeopteryx
section_title: Original description
hierarchical_section_title: Specimens of Archaeopteryx / The feather / History / Original description
context_page_description: Archaeopteryx fossils from the quarries of Solnhofen limestone represent the most famous and well-known fossils from this area. They are highly significant to paleontology and avian evolution in that they document the fossil record's oldest-known birds.
  Over the years, twelve body fossil specimens of Archaeopteryx and a feather that may belong to it have been found, though the Haarlem specimen was reassigned to another genus by two researchers in 2017. All of the fossils come from the upper Jurassic lithographic limestone deposits, quarried for centuries, near Solnhofen, Germany.
context_section_description: Von Meyer published his official description of the feather in the journal Palaeontographica in April 1862, wherein he expressed some doubt of its exact age and affinity. In his original description von Meyer mentioned neither the original discoverer nor the collector by name, and also omitted any diagnostic information about its prior ownership. It wasn't until the year of von Meyer's death, 1869, that the main slab came into the Munich collections. The feather's counterslab was acquired by the Natural History Museum of Berlin in 1876, after having been part of the private collection of von Fischer, a Munich physician.
  There was also some initial uncertainty as to whether the fossil represented a real feather as in modern birds, though von Meyer pointed out that he could detect no morphological difference between the fossil imprint and modern feathers, and was able to recognize the central shaft, the barbs and the barbules. He described the lower end of the shaft (the calamus) as being less clearly imprinted than the rest, and concluded that the feather may have belonged to a juvenile individual for whom the shaft was still soft. Von Meyer also noted that due to having been compressed, the vane was split in several places. As part of his original description von Meyer compared the feather to that of a partridge, noting that the only discernible difference was in being slightly smaller and less rounded at the end.
  Some doubt also existed at first as to whether the feather was a real fossil from the Solnhofen lithographic limestone. The preservation was regarded by von Meyer as unusual and therefore suspicious, as it appeared to be "transformed into a black substance" that reminded him of dendrites, which are inorganic pseudofossils. He thought it was possible that someone had skillfully painted the feather onto the stone. However, he could not conceive of an artificial way in which such a perfect feather - especially as it was reproduced in a perfect mirror image on both counterslabs - could be created by a human hand, and therefore concluded the feather must be genuine.
  Though von Meyer was certain that the fossil feather was real, he was very reluctant to assign it with certainty to a bird, noting that the concurrent feathered skeleton could be "a feathered animal which differs from our birds essentially". His reluctance to link feathers to birds with certainty was prophetic, as it predated the discovery of very advanced, birdlike feathers on non-avian theropod dinosaurs by well over a century.
caption: Hermann von Meyer
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