A History of Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere

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MacMillan, 1913 - 693 pages
 

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Page 136 - During the voyage of the Beagle I had been deeply impressed by discovering in the Pampean formation great fossil animals covered with armour like that on the existing armadillos; secondly, by the manner in which closely allied animals replace one another in proceeding southwards...
Page 34 - Without doubt several hundred thousand animals thus perished in the river ; their bodies when putrid were seen floating down the stream ; and many in all probability were deposited in the estuary of the Plata. All the small rivers became highly saline) and this caused the death of vast numbers in particular spots ; for when an animal drinks of such water it does not recover. Azara describes the fury of the wild horses on a similar occasion, rushing into the marshes, those which arrived first being...
Page 34 - I was informed by an eyewitness that the cattle in herds of thousands rushed into the Parana, and being exhausted by hunger they were unable to crawl up the muddy banks, and thus were drowned.
Page 141 - Labrabor to Alaska. Beyond this forest is a treeless expanse whose distant shores are bathed in the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean. Concurrently with these changes in vegetation from the south northward occur equally marked differences in the mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects. Among mammals the tapirs, monkeys, armadillos, nasuas, peccaries, and opossums of Central America and Mexico are replaced to the northward by wood-rats, marmots, chipmunks, foxes, rabbits, short-tailed field-mice of several...
Page 35 - Callabonna, that will be afterwards described, in the fact that its bed has lately been shown to be a veritable necropolis of gigantic extinct Marsupials and Birds, which have apparently died where they lie, literally in hundreds. The facts that the bones of individuals are often unbroken, close together and frequently in their proper relative positions, the attitude of many of the bodies and the character of the matrix in which they are embedded, negative any theory that they have been carried thither...
Page 136 - ... over the Continent ; and thirdly, by the South American character of most of the productions of the Galapagos archipelago, and more especially by the manner in which they differ slightly on each island of the group ; none of the islands appearing to be very ancient in a geological sense.
Page 34 - Subsequently to the drought of 1827 to 1832, a very rainy season followed, which caused great floods. Hence it is almost certain that some thousands of the skeletons were buried by the deposits of the very next year. What would be the opinion of a geologist, viewing such an enormous collection of bones, of all kinds of animals and of all ages, thus embedded in one thick earthy mass ? Would he not attribute it to a flood having swept over the surface of the land, rather than to the common order of...
Page 411 - But, though the original or common type has never been departed from in essentials, variation has been very active among them within certain limits, and the great difficulty which all zoologists have felt in subdividing them into natural minor groups arises from the fact that the changes in different organs (feet, skull, frontal appendages, teeth, cutaneous glands, etc.) have proceeded with such apparent irregularity and absence of correlation that the different modifications of these parts are most...
Page 589 - The conclusions of the writers with regard to the evidence thus far furnished are that it fails to establish the claim that in South America there have been brought forth thus far tangible traces of either geologically ancient man himself or of any precursors of the human race.

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