The great proboscidians of the Glacial epoch were about the size of
modern elephants, and somewhat smaller than their ancestral species in
the Pliocene. The _Mastodon_ ranged over all North America south of
Hudson Bay, but had become extinct in the Old World at the end of the
Tertiary. The elephants were represented by the _Mammoth_, which
roamed in immense herds from our middle states to Alaska, and from
Arctic Asia to the Mediterranean and Atlantic.
It is an oft-told story how about a century ago, near the Lena River
in Siberia, there was found the body of a mammoth which had been
safely preserved in ice for thousands of years, how the flesh was
eaten by dogs and bears, and how the eyes and hoofs and portions of
the hide were taken with the skeleton to St. Petersburg. Since then
several other carcasses of the mammoth, similarly preserved in ice,
have been found in the same region,--one as recently as 1901. We know
from these remains that the animal was clothed in a coat of long,
coarse hair, with thick brown fur beneath.
[Illustration: Fig. 371. Skull of Musk Ox, from Pleistocene
Deposits, Iowa]
=The distribution of animals and plants.= The distribution of species
in the Glacial epoch was far different from that of the present. In
the glacial stages arctic species ranged south into what are now
temperate latitudes. The walrus throve along the shores of Virginia
and the musk ox grazed in Iowa and Kentucky. In Europe the reindeer
and arctic fox reached the Pyrenees. During the Champlain depression
arctic shells lived along the shore of the arm of the sea which
covered the St. Lawrence valley. In interglacial times of milder
climate the arctic fauna-flora retreated, and their places were taken
by plants and animals from the south. Peccaries, now found in Texas,
ranged into Michigan and New York, while great sloths from South
America reached the middle states. Interglacial beds at Toronto,
Canada, contain remains of forests of maple, elm, and papaw, with
mollusks now living in the Mississippi basin.
What changes in the forests of your region would be brought about, and
in what way, if the climate should very gradually grow colder? What
changes if it should grow warmer?
On the Alps and the highest summits of the White Mountains of New
England are found colonies of arctic species of plants and insects.
How did they come to be thus separated from their home beyond the
arctic circle by a thousand miles and more of temperate climate
impossible to cross?
=Man.= Along with the remains of the characteristic animals of the
time which are now extinct there have been found in deposits of the
Glacial epoch in the Old World relics of Pleistocene _Man_, his bones,
and articles of his manufacture. In Europe, where they have best been
studied, human relics occur chiefly in peat bogs, in loess, in caverns
where man made his home, and in high river terraces sometimes eighty
and a hundred feet above the present flood plains of the streams.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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