No less interesting in their own way are the remains of other hoofed forms
that lead down to the elephants of to-day and to the mammoth and mastodon
of relatively recent geologic times. Common sense would lead to the
conclusion that a form like a modern tapir was the prototype from which
these creatures have arisen, and common sense would lead us to expect that
if any fossils of the ancestors of the modern group of elephants occurred
at all they would be like tapirs. Thus a fossil of much significance in
this connection is _Moeritherium_, whose remains have been found in the
rocks exposed in the Libyan desert, for this creature was practically a
tapir, while at the same time its characters of muzzle and tusk mark it as
very close to the ancestors of the larger woolly elephants of later
geological times, when the trunk had grown considerably and the tusks had
become greatly prolonged. Again the fossil sequence confirms the
conclusions of comparative anatomy, regarding the mode by which certain
modern animals have evolved.
The fossil deer of North America, as well as many other even-toed members
of the group of mammalia possessing hoofs, provide the same kind of
conclusive evidence. The feature of particular interest in the case of
their horns, is a correspondence between the fossil sequence and the order
of events in the life-history of existing species,--that is, between the
results of palaeontology and of embryology.
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