United States or Switzerland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It presents three complete toes one large median and two smaller lateral ones; and there is a rudiment of that digit, which answers to the little finger of the human hand. The European record of the pedigree of the horse stops here; in the American Tertiaries, on the contrary, the series of ancestral equine forms is continued into the Eocene formations.
In the far-away ages, when they were being deposited deep under the surface of the Eocene sea, they saw vast monsters floating in the salty deep, and later, fishes of all sizes, and even great beds of waving sea-moss and ferns floated back and forth, as the tides ebbed and flowed.
Talking to Melissa in a time of commercial trouble, I found her disposed to speak pathetically of the disgrace which had fallen on Sir Gavial Mantrap, because of his conduct in relation to the Eocene Mines, and to other companies ingeniously devised by him for the punishment of ignorance in people of small means: a disgrace by which the poor titled gentleman was actually reduced to live in comparative obscurity on his wife's settlement of one or two hundred thousand in the consols.
Rhinoceroses and zebras, however, tread together the arid plains of Africa in the present day; and the horse has multiplied in that half of America where two or more kinds of tapir still exist. That the continents of the Eocene or Miocene periods were less diversified in respect of swamp and sward, pampas or desert, than those of the Pliocene period, has no support from observation or analogy."
I think that this desideratum is very nearly, if not quite, supplied by Plagiolophus, remains of which occur abundantly in some parts of the Upper and Middle Eocene formations.
But the most important discovery of all is the Orohippus, which comes from the Eocene formation, and is the oldest member of the equine series, as yet known. Here we find four complete toes on the front limb, three toes on the hind limb, a well-developed ulna, a well-developed fibula, and short-crowned grinders of simple pattern.
We cannot suppose that every type has been preserved, but we see that our bird-world was virtually created in the early part of the Tertiary Era. With these more or less familiar types were large ostrich-like survivors of the older order. The absence of early Eocene remains prevents us from tracing the lines of our vast and varied bird-kingdom to their Mesozoic beginnings.
Next follow the trias strata, as under the Velebits and westwards from Sinj, then the sandstone beds, the different eocene beds and alluvial strata, as in the plain of Dernis, north of the Vrana Lake, by Nona and Imoski.
Even in the Eocene, about five per cent of marine shells were of species still living, and in the Pliocene the proportion had risen to more than one half. Fishes were of modern types. Teleosts were now abundant.
There is nothing, then, in what is known of the older Eocene mammals of the Arctogaeal province to forbid the supposition that they stood in an ancestral relation to those of the Calcaire Grossier and the Gypsum of the Paris basin, and that our present fauna, therefore, is directly derived from that which already existed in Arctogaea at the commencement of the Tertiary period.
Word Of The Day