The suggestion was received with sceptical astonishment, and the paper in which Owen announced it to the Zoological Society (November 12, 1839) narrowly escaped exclusion from the _Transactions_ of that body on the ground of its improbability. But confirmation was not slow to arrive, though in a direction that was not then expected. The bone was not fossilized; it was therefore naturally concluded that there existed somewhere in New Zealand—then but partially explored—a race of birds of gigantic stature and struthious affinities. We have no space to tell the story of the extinction of the moa, as the natives call it—surely the most weird and curious of all ‘the fairy-tales of science’; but to Owen certainly belongs the credit of having been the first to point the way to the great discovery. No work of his created so much excitement. Society, headed by Prince Albert, hurried to inspect the huge remains, of which a large series soon reached this country, and to be introduced to the fortunate necromancer, at whose bidding a phantom procession of strange creatures had suddenly stepped out of the past into the present. From this time forward Owen continued to pay as much attention to extinct as to recent animals, as his numerous publications testify. The work fascinated and excited him. ‘There was no hunt,’ he declared, ‘so exciting, so full of interest, and so satisfactory when events prove one to have been on the right scent, as that of a huge beast which no eye will ever see alive, and which, perhaps, no mortal eye ever did behold. Such a chase is not ended in a day, in a week, nor in a season. One’s interest is revived and roused year by year as bit by bit of the petrified portions of the skeleton comes to hand. Thirty such years elapsed before I was able to outline a restoration of _Diprotodon australis_’ [the gigantic extinct kangaroo].