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DINORNITHIDAE.
MOAS.
The first announcement of the former existence of large Struthious birds in New Zealand was made by Mr. J. S. Polack in 1838. In his book New Zealand, he states that he found large bird bones near East Cape in the North Island. The first specimen, however, that came into the hands of a scientific man was the bone sent to Professor Owen in 1839 by Mr. Rule, who reported that the natives had told him that it was the bone of a large Eagle which they called "Movie." Professor Owen, with his extraordinary knowledge, at once saw that far from any connection with the Raptores, Mr. Rule's bone was a portion of a femur of a gigantic Struthious bird. He described it on November 12th, 1839, at a meeting of the Zoological Society, and it was figured on Plate 3 of Volume III of the Transactions of the Zoological Society.
The next notice of the Moas takes the form of a letter, received by Professor Owen from the Rev. W. C. Cotton, dated Waimate, near the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, July 11th, 1842; and in it the writer gives an account of his meeting with the Rev. Mr. Wm. Williams, a fellow missionary at East Cape. The latter had collected a lot of "Moa" bones and sent them to a Dr. Buckland. Mr. Williams also reported a conversation with two Englishmen, who declared they had been taken out by a native at night and had seen a Moa alive, but had been too frightened to shoot it.
On January 24th, 1843, Professor Owen exhibited a number of bones from Mr. Williams' collection, and described them, giving the bird the name of "Megalornis novaezealandiae," afterwards changing the generic title into Dinornis, as Megalornis was preoccupied. Afterwards, when describing these bones and those contained in the second box of Mr. Williams' collection more fully, he somewhat inconsistently changed the specific name to struthioides, which Captain Hutton, in his later classification, retained. Following the laws of priority, however (novaezealandiae has 10 months' priority over struthioides), we must reinstate the name novaezealandiae.
A number of other finds occurred between 1842 and 1847, but by far the largest and most important collections were made and sent home between 1847 and 1852 by the Hon. W. Mantell, who sent to Professor Owen many hundreds of bones and eggshells, from which the Professor was enabled to determine and describe a large number of species, and even as early as this to separate some genera.
