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The Mastodon: Africa

Discoveries in Russia, the United States and Africa have thrown much additional light on the strange reptiles of the Permian age and increased the probability that in them we have a clue to the ancestors of mammals. Our knowledge of the past history of birds remains practically unchanged, we know a few more species; one or two remarkable forms, like the giant vulture of La Brea, greatest of the birds of flight, but we have no new light on the origin and early variations of birds. One of the most interesting discoveries, partly because of its peculiar nature, has been that of the asphalt beds at La Brea, Southern California. Here the soft, sticky beds of asphalt, besprinkled with little pools of water, served as a gigantic trap for unsuspecting RETROSPECT animals of the Pleistocene. Hither, if we read the story aright, came great ground sloths to quench their thirst and here they became first caught, then engulfed in the treacherous pitch. It needs the pen of Wells to depict the tragedies that took place about this innocent looking, black-hearted lake of pitch; to tell of the mighty struggles of ponderous Mylodon to free himself from the trap only at each throe to sink a little deeper in its semisolid depths. Then we see the prowling wolf of those days and the vicious sabre-toothed tiger snarling and quarreling over their helpless, hapless prey only to find themselves in turn trapped and slowly sucked down to death. Nor did the chain of destruction end here, for birds of prey, eagles and vultures, flocking to the scene, also became ensnared and perished miserably. Truly, as Dr. White so well put it, Nature is extravagantly wasteful and terribly cruel.

From the discoveries thus briefly touched upon, we are enabled to make certain general deductions in regard to the geography of the past. It is clear that for a long time Africa and South America were, like Australia, independent continents within which were slowly developed peculiar and curious forms. Later on, when Africa was united with Europe and Asia, its huge elephants migrated east and west into new territory and established themselves for a while over practically the whole northern hemisphere. Similarly, South America, in Pliocene times, was united with North America and the Giant Ground Sloths, Megatherium and Mylodon, with some of the quaint armored glyptodons, slowly made their way along the coast to Florida and even South Carolina.

And then came the evening of these races of great lumbering animals and one by one they fell by the wayside leaving only two species of elephants as reminders of the time when the greater part of the world was theirs.1 It has been, and it is, an ever-changing world. The great difference between past and present is that now by the agency of man it is changing much more rapidly. Man with his disregard of the past and small thought of the future destroys in a year what it took Nature ages to produce-man sweeps away forests, the growth of centuries, and with them wipes out of existence races of animals that represent the culmination of thousands of years of evolution ever onward and upward. So rapidly is this extermination taking place that Professor Osborn believes that "By the middle of this century man will be alone amid the ruins of the mammalian world he has destroyed, the period of the Age of Mammals will have entirely closed, and the Age of Man will have reached a numerical climax, from which some statisticians believe it will probably recede, because we are approaching the point of the overpopulation of the earth in three of the five great continents."

With the disappearance of the forests comes the shrinking of streams and at the same time the sweeping away by floods of fertile soil that results from long ages of growth.

Moreover, man turns his attention to his fellow man and blots out whole races, or, if they survive, it is with changed customs.

We live, as we are often told, in a period of transition and no one with certainty may predict the outcome.

Meanwhile Nature, who has in Time a mute but resist- 1The African Elephant has been subdivided into about a dozen species, but whether these are all good species or simply local races or subspecies remains to be shown. RETROSPECT less ally, smiles at, or tolerates, the ravages of puny man. There is good reason to believe that we of the northern hemisphere may be living in the midst of an interglacial epoch, and, if this be so, that even now slowly but relentlessly the hosts of the ice king are being marshalled to dispossess man of his fair heritage in the north. Twice, at least, in the past, our northern states, as well as Europe, have been buried beneath thousands of feet of ice and snow even as is the south pole to-day. Gradually is being assembled the army that will sweep man before it even as it did the mammoth and mastodon in past ages: advancing a few feet this year, retreating a foot or two next season, but never losing all the ground it has gained, the great ice sheet is slowly shaping out of mist and snow the vast fighting machine that will drive man from the populous cities of the north. And who shall say that 100,000 years from now, when the great earth pendulum has swung the other way, some race of supermen, working northwards as the climate changes, may not be investigating the site of this museum and reconstructing the habits of the poor, unintelligent inhabitants of what was once New York.

American Museum of Natural History May 1, 1922.

REFERENCES.

Examples of the various animals mentioned in this chapter, as well as in the others, will be found in the American Museum of Natural History. Among them may be mentioned a mounted skeleton of Brontosaurus, two of Trachodon (Thespesius) and the remarkable "mummied" specimen showing the texture of the skin. A single skeleton of the great predatory Tyrannosaurus is shown, pending the construction of an addition to the Museum that will provide room for two complete skeletons.

The historic Warren Mastodon was acquired some years ago and is placed near the skeleton of a mammoth from Indiana. The past history of the horse is very completely illustrated not only by many examples of feet and skulls, but by numerous complete skeletons showing well the progress from the little four-toed Eohippus -as he is now called to the modern horse. What differences in size and build have taken place in recent times through the agency of man is shown by skeletons of recent horses varying in size and build from the massive dray horse to the graceful Arabian and the Shetland Pony. Those especially interested in the horse may obtain very complete information from the Guide Leaflet on the Evolution of the Horse.

Other exhibits deal with the brief (comparatively) but remarkable career of the great Titanotheres, and the evolution of the camel , while the great Mylodon and his relatives and the asphalt trap of La Brea with its prey are both displayed.

A INDEX INDEX The asterisk denotes that the animal or object is figured on or opposite the page referred to.

Æpyornis, egg of, 121, 120, 122, 130 eggs found in swamps, 122; found floating, 122 eggs used for bowls, 121 origin of fable of Roc, 119 Alaskan Live Mammoth Story, 153-155 Ankylosaurus, 95, 187 Anomœpus tracks, 26 Apteryx egg, 122 Archæopteryx, description of, 55, 56 discovery of, 56 earliest known bird, 51* restoration, 68* specimens of, 55, 56 wing, 52,* 66* Archelon, a great turtle, 39, 40* Asphalt beds at La Brea, 188 Basilosaurus, 44 See also Zeuglodon Beehler, L. W., 166, 169 Birds, always clad in feathers, 51, 106 earliest, 51 first intimation of, 55 rarity of fossil, 62 related to reptiles, 82 wings of embryonic, 67 with teeth, 56, 61 Bison, European, 182 Books of reference, 10, 21, 31, 49, 68, 79, 96, 113, 130, 143, 158, 174, 192 INDEX Breeding of large animals, 183 Brontornis, size of leg-bones, 123 Brontosaurus, 80,* size of bones, 85, 96, 188 Brooks, W. K., on Lingula, 180 Buffalo legend, 171 Buttons as vestigial structures, 161 Carcharodon auriculatus, 48 megalodon, 47 teeth, 47, 48 estimated size, 47 Carson City footprints, 30 Casts, how formed, 6, 7 Cats and clover, 184 Cephalaspis, 14,* 15 Ceratosaurus, habits, 92 Changes in Nature slow, 179 Cheirotherium, 28 Chlamydosaurus, 108 Cold, effects of, on animals, 181, 182, 183 Cold winters, 181 Collecting fossils, 10, 97-100 Color of large land animals, 112 of young animals, 112, 113 Covering of extinct animals sometimes indicated, 109, 111 Coyotes, effect of their destruction on fruit, 185 Cycnorhampus, 71* Dall, W. H., theory as to extinction of mollusks, 227 Delabeche's restorations, 114* Diatryma, 125-127, 126,* 130 Dimorphodon, 74*, 75* Dinichthys, 18* skull and jaws of, 20*