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Updated: June 5, 2025
The man was confident that they could not hope to cross the desert country to the east in the face of thirst and hunger, while behind them in the valley of plenty lay almost equal danger in the form of carnivores and the warlike natives. After the plane came to its sudden and disastrous stop, Smith-Oldwick turned quickly to see what the effect of the accident had been on the girl.
It was the coming of the carnivores, therefore, that accelerated the development of brain matter, and started the process which created man. But in the millions and millions of years of conflicts, instincts grew into being that sank deep into bone and marrow. The most fundamental reflexes, those immediate responses to irritation or danger, were laid down, and among them the drive and check system.
There could now be scarcely a score left of the dangerous carnivores; the braver of these were already dead. After the death of this poor dog of mine, my last friend, I too adopted to some extent the practice of slumbering in the daytime in order to be on my guard at night.
Their early Eocene ancestors, the Creodonts, gave rise in the Eocene to forms which we may regard as the forerunners of the cat-family and dog-family, to which most of our familiar Carnivores belong. Cyonodon has a wolf-like appearance, and Amphicyon rather suggests the fox. Primitive weasels, civets, and hyaenas appear also in the Eocene.
The hoofed mammals of the Tertiary included many offshoots from the main lines which we have traced. Among them were a number of genera of clumsy, ponderous brutes, some almost elephantine in their bulk. From these primitive flesh eaters, with small and simple brains, numerous small teeth, and plantigrade tread, the different families of the carnivores of the present have slowly evolved.
Seals are often regarded as belonging to this order, but their relation to the rest of the carnivores is very doubtful. Many of their characters are suggestive of Arctoidea, but it is an open question if their ancestors were bear or otter-like animals which took to an aquatic life, or whether they may not have had a long and independent descent.
In some instances we can trace the evolution with a wonderful fullness, considering the remoteness of the period and the conditions of preservation. Then, one by one, the abortive, the inelastic, the ill-fitted types are destroyed by changing conditions or powerful carnivores, and the field is left to the mammals which filled it when man in turn began his destructive career.
In the ages succeeding the deposition of the red marl Europe seems to have been broken up into an archipelago of coral reefs and atolls; and the islands of this ancient oolitic ocean were tenanted by numbers of tiny ancestral marsupials, some of which approached in appearance the pouched ant-eaters of Western Australia, while others resembled rather the phalangers and wombats, or turned into excellent imitation carnivores, like our modern friend the Tasmanian devil.
What seem to our eye the "eccentricities" and "convulsions" of the Ceratopsia and Deinocerata are much more likely to be defensive developments against a growing peril, but they were as futile against the new carnivores as were the assegais of the Zulus against the European.
He searched desperately for that Tube, and failed to find it. He was chased by carnivores, scratched by thorns, and at last pursued by a yelling horde of human devils who were fired into by Smithers from the mouth of the just-finished Tube. Tommy debated the story grimly as he stood guard in the Tube in the humid jungle night.
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