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But probably the ancestors of the rat-goat were slowly developed from a Miocene sheath-horned ruminant, a primitive sort of antelope in some part of North-west Africa, or in an extension of it now submerged in the Atlantic, and stragglers of this curious and now lost Ruminant stock were left in Majorca when in Miocene or early Pliocene times that island became detached from its Hispano-African connection.
The fact that the rat-goat is found on an island cut off from competition with other animals will favour this view.
On first considering the question of the origin of the rat-goat of Majorca, some naturalists will, no doubt, be tempted to suggest that it is a case of a sudden "sport," a "mutation" as they now call it, and not a result of gradual slowly developed reduction of the now lost teeth and correspondingly gradual enlargement of the two middle ones, taking many thousand generations to bring about.
The questions that arise are: Where did the rat-goat come from? How did this utterly peculiar change in a Ruminant's teeth come about?
The pig's teeth are the same in number as those of the ancestral primitive typidentate mammal, and their form is near to that of the ancestor's teeth. Now I come to the extraordinary interest of Miss Bate's goat-like or antelope-like animal from Majorca. Hence the name given to this little marvel by Miss Bate "Myotragus," "the rat-goat."
Apart from the view, which is very generally held, that such sudden "mutations" as "rat-teeth in a ruminant" are even should they occur not perpetuated, we are not really in any way driven to suppose that the rat-goat of Majorca originated in that island. It is true that we know nothing like it in the Pliocene and Miocene of the Mediterranean region which could have been its immediate ancestor.
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