But it is very remarkable that while the Miocene fauna of the
Arctogaeal province, as a whole, is of the same character as the
existing fauna of the same province, as a whole, the component
elements of the fauna were differently associated. In the Miocene
epoch, North America possessed Elephants, Horses, Rhinoceroses, and
a great number and variety of Ruminants and Pigs, which are absent
in the present indigenous fauna; Europe had its Apes, Elephants,
Rhinoceroses, Tapirs, Musk-deer, Giraffes, Hyaenas, great Cats,
Edentates, and Opossum-like Marsupials, which have equally vanished
from its present fauna; and in Northern India, the African types of
Hippopotamuses, Giraffes, and Elephants were mixed up with what
are now the Asiatic types of the latter, and with Camels, and
Semnopithecine and Pithecine Apes of no less distinctly Asiatic forms.
In fact the Miocene mammalian fauna of Europe and the Himalayan
regions contains, associated together, the types which are at present
separately located in the South-African and Indian sub-provinces of
Arctogaea. Now there is every reason to believe, on other grounds,
that both Hindostan, south of the Ganges, and Africa, south of the
Sahara, were separated by a wide sea from Europe and North Asia during
the Middle and Upper Eocene epochs. Hence it becomes highly probable
that the well-known similarities, and no less remarkable differences,
between the present Faunae of India and South Africa have arisen
in some such fashion as the following. Some time during the Miocene
epoch, possibly when the Himalayan chain was elevated, the bottom of
the nummulitic sea was upheaved and converted into dry land, in the
direction of a line extending from Abyssinia to the mouth of the
Ganges. By this means, the Dekhan on the one hand, and South Africa
on the other, became connected with the Miocene dry land and with one
another. The Miocene mammals spread gradually over this intermediate
dry land; and if the condition of its eastern and western ends offered
as wide contrasts as the valleys of the Ganges and Arabia do now, many
forms which made their way into Africa must have been different from
those which reached the Dekhan, while others might pass into both
these sub-provinces.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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