Specimens of Archaeopteryx the results of his investigation was a talk at the Royal Society in London in November, and was published as an abstract in the Proceedings of the Royal Society the following year. Here he considered the single feather described by von Meyer in 1861 and assigned the new skeleton the same genus. Owen speculated possible short- and long-tailed forms of "Archaeopteryx" and on these grounds assigned the London specimen the species name "macrura", meaning "long-tailed". Owen, who published a monograph on the specimen in 1863, generally considered the animal to be a bird despite describing its structure and proportions as
Archaeopteryx be black throughout, with heavier pigmentation in the distal tip. The feather studied was most probably a dorsal covert, which would have partly covered the primary feathers on the wings. The study does not mean that "Archaeopteryx" was entirely black, but suggests that it had some black colouration which included the coverts. Carney pointed out that this is consistent with what we know of modern flight characteristics, in that black melanosomes have structural properties that strengthen feathers for flight. In a 2013 study published in the "Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry", new analyses of "Archaeopteryx"'s feathers revealed that the animal