United States or South Africa ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


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.

With regard to the second question, it is a matter of importance that although we have hitherto not discovered any Ruminants with this modification of the teeth, still less any cavicorn or sheath-horned Ruminant so altered, yet it is by no means rare amongst herbivorous mammals to find such rat-like teeth making their appearance, whilst the smaller side-teeth of the incisor group or front teeth disappear.

A vast series of living and of fossil animals, called the Ruminants including the giraffes, the antler-bearing forms called deer, the cavicorn or sheath-horned bovines, ovines and caprines, and the large series of antelopes of Africa and India all have precisely this form of jaw, this number and shape and grouping of the teeth.

In the genus Chamaeleon we come to the acme of difference between the sexes. These horns consist of an excrescence of bone covered with a smooth sheath, forming part of the general integuments of the body, so that they are identical in structure with those of a bull, goat, or other sheath-horned ruminant.