American Big Game in Its Haunts: The Book of the Boone and Crockett Club
History
American Big Game in Its Haunts: The Book of the Boone and Crockett Club
Big game hunting -- United States
This inference is drawn from the fact that the predominant fauna of
America in the Middle and Upper Miocene Age and in the Pliocene was
closely analogous to the still extant fauna of Africa. It is true we had
no real antelopes in this country, in fact none of the bovines, and no
giraffes; but there was a camel which my colleague Matthew has surnamed
the "giraffe camel," extraordinarily similar to the giraffe. There were
no hippopotami, no hyraces. All these peculiarly African animals, of
African origin, I believe, found their way into Europe at least as far
as the Sivalik Hills of India, but never across the Bering Sea
Isthmus. The only truly African animal which reached America, and which
flourished here in an extraordinary manner, was the elephant, or rather
the mastodon, if we speak of the elephant in its Miocene stage of
evolution. However, the resemblance between America and Africa is
abundantly demonstrated by the presence of great herds of horses, of
rhinoceroses, both long and short limbed, of camels in great variety,
including the giraffe-like type which was capable of browsing on the
higher branches of trees, of small elephants, and of deer, which in
adaptation to somewhat arid conditions imitated the antelopes in general
structure.
ELIMINATION BY THE GLACIAL PERIOD.
The Glacial Period eliminated half of this fauna, whereas the equatorial
latitude of the fauna in Africa saved that fauna from the attack of the
Glacial Period, which was so fatally destructive to the animals in the
more northerly latitudes of America. The glaciers or at least the very
low temperature of the period eliminated especially all the African
aspects of our fauna. This destructive agency was almost as baneful and
effective as the mythical Noah's flood. When it passed off, there
survived comparatively few indigenous North American animals, but the
country was repopulated from the entire northern hemisphere, so that the
magnificent wild animals which our ancestors found here were partly
North American and partly Eurasiatic in origin.
ELIMINATION BY MAN.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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