The Romance of Modern Geology: Describing in simple but exact language the making of the earth with some account of prehistoric animal lifeGrew, Edwin Sharpe
Science
The Romance of Modern Geology: Describing in simple but exact language the making of the earth with some account of prehistoric animal life
Grew, Edwin Sharpe
Geology; Paleontology
At length appeared the horse which had only one toe. This type,
that of the modern horse, first becomes known in the Upper Pliocene
beds of Europe, and represents the culmination of the race. The
completeness of the record of the evolution of the horse tells us
something of the enormous numbers of ancestral forms which must
have existed in the more than two million years that have elapsed
since the first diminutive horse appeared in North America. While
not strongly given to migration, in the course of time these
animals wandered over the entire world, with the exception of such
inaccessible places as Australia and the Oceanic Islands.... It
would seem that the original stock was of Eurasian derivation, though
the great theatre of the evolutionary drama was soon transferred
to North America, the Eurasian, African, and South American horses
which appear from time to time being in all probability of North
American origin. The ultimate fate of the horses in both North and
South America was extinction, all wild horses of our own time,
including the asses and zebras, being confined to Asia and Africa.
The apparently wild bands of the American western plains, and those
which roam over the pampas of South America, are the descendants of
domestic horses that have escaped from human bondage, largely from
the early Spanish explorers.
The rhinoceroses of to-day, the one-horned Indian variety and the
two-horned African rhinoceros, were preceded by a whole regiment of
rhinoceroses in the Tertiary period. One such was dug out in Fleet
Street during the excavation for the _Daily Chronicle_ office.
This rhinoceros had a hairy coat like the Mammoth which lived much
later, and in Siberia is found sometimes side by side with the later
quadruped. Many of the extinct rhinoceroses had two horns like the
African square-mouthed rhinoceros, which is sometimes misleadingly
called the white rhinoceros. One great extinct beast, the
_Elasmotherium_, allied to them, had a great horn carried on a huge
boss in the middle of its head instead of on the nose, while another
still huger animal called the _Titanotherium_ and found in North
America had a pair of horns perched on either side of its nose. As
large as the rhinoceros but having a very different arrangement of
the bones of its ankles and wrists and very different teeth and horns
are the extraordinary creatures known as _Dinoceras_, whole skeletons
of which have been disinterred from the Eocene strata of Wyoming
in the United States by Professor Marsh. These creatures had three
pairs of horns on the top of the head and a pair of great tusks as
well. Nearly all these animals, though they were more brainy than the
reptiles, had much smaller brains in proportion to their size than
the bulk of the animals which now roam the earth, from which we may
surmise that though a small brain suffices to guide a great animal
machine in established ways, yet in order to learn new things in its
lifetime an animal must have a big brain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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