A history of land mammals in the western hemisphereScott, William Berryman
History
A history of land mammals in the western hemisphere
Scott, William Berryman
Mammals; Mammals, Fossil
There was an extraordinarily rich and varied assemblage of hoofed
animals, all utterly different from those of the northern hemisphere and
belonging to groups which have never been found outside of South and
Central America. Of these groups there were five, which by different
writers are variously regarded as orders or suborders, a matter of very
secondary importance. Individually, the commonest of the hoofed mammals
were the †Toxodonta, which ranged in size from a sheep to a tapir,
heavily built and clumsy creatures, with absurdly small, three-toed feet;
in some of the species there was a small median horn on the forehead. As
with the †glyptodonts and †ground-sloths, the contrast in size between
the Santa Cruz ancestors and the Pleistocene descendants was very
striking. A very numerous and varied group was that of the †Typotheria,
all small animals, some no larger than rabbits, others the size of
small foxes. It requires a decided effort to think of these †typotheres
as being really hoofed animals at all, as their whole appearance must
have been much more like that of rodents, yet their structure clearly
demonstrates their near relationship to the †toxodonts. Still a third
group of the same series, the †Entelonychia, is of great interest, for,
as in the †chalicotheres of the northern hemisphere, the hoofs had been
transformed into claws and their five-toed feet had a truly grotesque
appearance, not diminished by the long and powerful limbs and relatively
small head.
This is the third example of that paradoxical creature, a “hoofed animal”
with claws instead of hoofs, and in each of the three instances, there
is every reason to believe, the transformation proceeded independently.
Among the perissodactyls the †chalicotheres (p. 238) underwent this
change; in North America the †Agriochœridæ, a family of artiodactyls,
had a very similar history, while in South America the †Entelonychia
arose from the same stock as the †toxodonts, with which they were nearly
allied. They were among the largest animals of Santa Cruz times and
ranged in size from an ox to a rhinoceros.
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