Myopteryx

Oregon is filled with natural wonders. Depicted left and only recently photographed by the author and his wife on the fringes of Harney County’s Alvord Desert are tracks left by Myopteryx, theorized as early as 1934 to be a descendant of the Jurassic Archaeopteryx or “Urvogel”. Google says Myopteryx was originally classified by Paleontologists A.J. Czypoweiski and H. Hellmann in 1921.

 Hellmann and Czypoweiski et al postulated that Myopteryx flourished during the Othostyrene, a rarely-documented segment of time between the Pliocene and Miocene epochs. Because of the bird-shot-size coprolites common on the fringes of the Alvord, it is believed that Myopteryx was a typical prey of the now-endangered Myotis Lucifugis.

The original paper publishing the full results of the 1921 Expedition can be viewed in the archives of the Journal of the American Philosophical Society.  Collaborators Hellmann & Czypoweiski concluded that Myopteryx disappeared from the fossil record about 6-7 million years ago and “wasn’t very big”.