The Student's Elements of GeologyLyell, Charles, Sir
Science
The Student's Elements of Geology
Lyell, Charles, Sir
Geology
Among the fresh-water strata of this age near the base of the Pyrenees
are marls, limestones and sands, in which the eminent comparative
anatomist, M. Lartet, has obtained a great number of fossil mammalia
common to the faluns of the Loire and the Upper Miocene beds of
Switzerland, such as _Dinotherium giganteum_ and _Mastodon
angustidens_; also the bones of quadrumana, or of the ape and monkey
tribe, which were discovered in 1837, the first of that order of
quadrupeds detected in Europe. They were found near Auch, in the
Department of Gers, in latitude 43° 39′ N. About forty miles west of
Toulouse. They were referred by MM. Lartet and Blainville to a genus
closely allied to the Gibbon, to which they gave the name of
_Pliopithecus._ Subsequently, in 1856, M. Lartet described another
species of the same family of long-armed apes (_Hylobates_), which he
obtained from strata of the same age at Saint-Gaudens, in the Haute
Garonne. The fossil remains of this animal consisted of a portion of a
lower jaw with teeth and the shaft of a humerus. It is supposed to have
been a tree-climbing frugivorous ape, equalling man in stature. As the
trunks of oaks are common in the lignite beds in which it lay, it has
received the generic name of _Dryopithecus._ The angle formed by the
ascending ramus of the jaw and the alveolar border is less open, and
therefore more like the human subject, than in the Chimpanzee, and what
is still more remarkable, the fossil, a young but adult individual, had
all its milk teeth replaced by the second set, while its last true
molar (or wisdom-tooth) was still undeveloped, or only existed as a
germ in the jaw-bone. In the mode, therefore, of the succession of its
teeth (which, as in all the old-World apes, exactly agree in number
with those in man) it differed from the Gorilla and Chimpanzee, and
corresponded with the human species.
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