en greatly strengthened by the discovery of several species in Genus Benz, the oldest fossil dating to 1885, a fossil of Genus Lambert (1891), and two closely related species in Genus Duryea, species frank and species charles (c 1892-93), all of which had one-cylinder gasoline engines. A major problem with this proposal is that the number of cylinders seems to reach a peak in the Mesozoic Era of the ultralarge classic cars; it is not uncommon to find V-8's and straight-12's in the time frame 1925-1942 when the luxurious fast motorcar reached a level never to be achieved again in carriage history so far. Well-known species in this prolific category include Rolls royce from Great Britain, Hispano suiza from Spain and France, as well as representative species in the genera Bugatti, Delage, Delahaye, Hotchkiss, Talbot, and Voisin of France; Dusenberg, Cadillac, Packard and Pierce-Arrow of the United States; Horch, Maybach, and Mercedes-Benz of Germany; genus Minerva of Belgium, and Isotta-Fraschini of Italy. All of these specimens are believed by scientists to have been very fast (90 to 130 mph), comfortable, and exquisitely luxurious (e.g., some fossils have been found with remains of upholstery in matched ostrich hide with ivory buttons, dashboards in rosewood, etc.). The question of why these marvelous carriages went extinct is still a matter of much debate among paleocarraigeologists today, but one widely accepted theory is that a catastrophic collapse of the market in 1929 so altered the economic climate that many species of the Mesozoic Era simply could not survive. Another problem with the number-of-cylinders hypothesis is that many of our most modern species (since the Pleistocene began in the 1960's) have only four cylinders, and a few only three. This phenomenon of an evolutionary regression to smaller engines appears to be worldwide in its scope.
D. Type of carburetor: It has been suggested that a series of gradually more advanced features in the carburetor, clearly preserved in the fossil record, would prove to be the key to unravelling phyletic relationships in Phylum Gasolinolophyta. The most primitive carburetor ever described was found in a fossil near Allentown, Pennsylvania, and dated to the year 1899; this rare species relied on a wooden wick that delivered fuel to the cylinder by capillary action. Indeed, many other increasingly complex features can be documented in the fossil remains of carburetors, but these often emerge simultaneously in numerous distinct phyletic lines. The attempt to unravel the phylogeny of the Phylum Gasolinolophyta on the basis of carburetor evolution has been frustrated over and over again by parallel developments, a phenomenon known as ``convergent evolution.'' The most recent example in carriage history is the sudden appearance of fuel injection as a replacement for more conventional carburetion in numerous independent classes and families of Phylum Gasolinolophyta. This amazing evolutionary jump involves the precise metering of fuel for each cylinder and thus provides a means of insuring that the ideal air-fuel ratio is being burned in the engine. It also eliminates cylinder-to-cylinder variations and the tendency of cylinders more remote from the carburetor to receive less fuel than is desired. A variety of metering and control systems have evolved, with a continuous-flow system first appearing in a fossil from 1957. The selective advantages for all these parallel systems were evidently great enough to produce this striking example of convergent evolution, or, to word it slightly differently, the selection pressure was great enough to cause different classes and families of gasoline powered autolocomotes to all evolve in this direction.
E. Type of starter: Another striking evolutionary advance in the development of autolocomote fauna is the electric starter. No one quesitons that the primitive hand-crank type of starter at some point must have evolved into the far more sophisticated electrical starter, yet the origin of this device is obscure. The fossil Duryea crank has been