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Objections to sudden changes. Labyrinthodont. Potto. Cetacea. As to origin of bird's wing. Tendrils of climbing plants. Animals once supposed to be connecting links. Early specialization of structure. Macrauchenia. Glyptodon. Sabre-toothed tiger. Conclusion.
A strange quarry for men whose paeliolithic progenitors hunted the woolly mastodon and many-horned rhinoceros and sabre-toothed tiger!
There was a time when huge bird-like reptiles were the lords of creation, and after these had been "sealed within the iron hills" there came successive dynasties of mammals; and as the iguanodon gave place to the great Eocene marsupials, as the mastodon and the sabre-toothed lion have long since vanished from the scene, so may not Man by and by disappear to make way for some higher creature, and so on forever?
The hippopotamus floundered in the Severn, the rhinoceros ranged over the south-western counties; enormous elk and oxen, of species now extinct, inhabited the vast fir and larch forests which stretched from Norfolk to the farthest part of Wales; hyenas and bears double the size of our modern ones, and here and there the sabre-toothed tiger, now extinct, prowled out of the caverns in the limestone hills, to seek their bulky prey.
The sabre-toothed lion has gone the way of all flesh; the deinotherium and the colossal ruminants of the Pliocene Age no longer browse beside the banks of Seine.
In that singular animal the spinal column had most of its joints fused together, forming a rigid cylindrical rod, a modification, as far as yet known, absolutely peculiar to it. In a similar way the extinct machairodus, or sabre-toothed tiger, is characterized by a more highly differentiated and specially carnivorous dentition than is shown by any predacious beast of the present day.
That the hazards of the past, to many forms of life, at least, have been real and no myth, is evident from the vast number of forms that have been cut off and become extinct; various causes, now hard to decipher, have worked together to the end, such as changed geographical conditions, changes of climate, affecting the food-supply, extreme specialization, like that of the sabre-toothed tiger whose petrified remains have been found in various parts of this continent, and who apparently was finally handicapped by his huge dental sabre.
Man was present when rhinoceros and elephant were as common in Britain as they are to-day in Southern India or Borneo; when the hippopotamus was as much at home in the waters of the Thames as in the Nile and Niger; when huge bears like the grizzly of the Rockies, cave-lions and sabre-toothed tigers lurked in Devon caverns or chased the bison over the hills of Kent.
The dog-family seems to have developed chiefly in North America. As in the case of the Ungulates, we find many strange side-branches which flourished for a time, but are unknown to-day. Machoerodus, usually known as "the sabre-toothed tiger," though not a tiger, was one of the most formidable of these transitory races.
So, too, the huge Titanotheria of the American continent, and all the powerful mammals of Pleistocene South America, the sabre-toothed lion, for instance, and the Machrauchenia suddenly came to a finish when they were still almost at the zenith of their rule. And in no case does the record of the fossils show a really dominant species succeeded by its own descendants.
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