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Updated: May 3, 2025
The story of their evolution has been worked out by Professors Leidy, Marsh, Cope, and H. F. Osborne. A recent bit of paleontological evidence bearing on the question of the introduction of species is that presented by Dr. J. L. Wortman in connection with the fossil lineage of the edentates.
It is really astonishing that only one small ruminant should be found on this immense grassy area, so admirably suited to herbivorous quadrupeds, a portion of which at the present moment affords sufficient pasture to eighty millions of sheep, cattle, and horses. In La Plata the author of The Mammoth and the Flood will find few to quarrel with his doctrine. Of Edentates there are four.
In the Miocene epoch, North America possessed Elephants, Horses, Rhinoceroses, and a great number and variety of Ruminants and Pigs, which are absent in the present indigenous fauna; Europe had its Apes, Elephants, Rhinoceroses, Tapirs, Musk-deer, Giraffes, Hyaenas, great Cats, Edentates, and Opossum-like Marsupials, which have equally vanished from its present fauna; and in Northern India, the African types of Hippopotamuses, Giraffes, and Elephants were mixed up with what are now the Asiatic types of the latter, and with Camels, and Semnopithecine and Pithecine Apes of no less distinctly Asiatic forms.
The largest of the edentates was the Megatherium, a. clumsy ground sloth bigger than a rhinoceros. The bones of the Megatherium are extraordinarily massive, the thigh bone being thrice as thick as that of an elephant, and the animal seems to have been well able to get its living by overthrowing trees and stripping off their leaves.
The total Miocene fauna comprises many genera, and species of Catarrhine Apes, of Bats, of Insectivora; of Arctogaeal types of Rodentia; of Proboscidea; of equine, rhinocerotic, and tapirine quadrupeds; of cameline, bovine, antilopine, cervine, and traguline Ruminants; of Pigs and Hippopotamuses; of Viverridae and Hyaenidae among other Carnivora; with Edentata allied to the Arctogaeal Orycteropus and Manis, and not to the Austro-Columbian Edentates.
It is the reduction in size, to a greater or less degree, of the second and third digits of the foot in Australian marsupials, and this, in spite of the very different form and function of the foot in different groups of those animals. A similarly significant evidence of relationship is afforded by processes of the zygomatic region of the skull in certain edentates existing and extinct.
Most other edentates are diurnal and almost exclusively insectivorous, some feeding only on ants; they have unchangeable habits, very limited intelligence, and vanish before civilization. The hairy armadillo alone has struck out a line for itself.
Darwin himself had shown some years before that the fossil animals of any continent are closely related to the existing animals of that continent edentates predominating, for example, in South America, and marsupials in Australia.
Assuming that these two young bats had, before I found them, existed like parasites clinging to the parent, their adroit actions when liberated, and their angry demonstrations at my approach, were very astonishing; for in all other mammals born in a perfectly helpless state, like rodents, weasels, edentates, and even marsupials, the instincts of self-preservation are gradually developed after the period of activity begins, when the mother leads them out, and they play with her and Avith each other.
Here and there turkeys showed themselves with their milk and coffee-colored plumage; and peccaries, a sort of wild pig highly appreciated by lovers of venison, and agouties, which are the hares and rabbits of Central America; and tatous belonging to the order of edentates, with their scaly shells of patterns of mosaic.
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