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
Specimens of Archaeopteryx skeleton of a feathered animal from the same lithographic shale deposits, which would later be known as the London specimen. Coincidentally, von Meyer proposed the name "Archaeopteryx lithographica" for the feather, but not for the skeleton. Therefore, the official name of the animal was originally linked to the single feather rather than any actual skeleton, and is formally considered the original holotype. Though 1860 is often the year named for the feather's discovery, there is no proof of this date, and some authors consider it more likely to have been found in 1861, as it seems reasonable that von Meyer's