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
Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle "Archaeopteryx" fossil specimen and the resulting debate between English paleontologist Richard Owen, an opponent to evolution by natural selection, and Thomas Henry Huxley, an advocate for evolution. Hanson himself visits the Wyoming Dinosaur Center, a small museum in Thermopolis, Wyoming, which had acquired an "Archaeopteryx" specimen. Hanson interviews Richard Prum, the Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale University, who proposed a developmental theory of feather evolution, which focuses "on how feathers grow and not worrying about what they're used for." Hanson also interviews Alan Feduccia, a professor at the University of North Carolina, who disagrees with the scientific consensus that