SOME CURIOUS ANIMALS.

Clutha Leader, Volume XXXIII, Issue 2027, 6 July 1906, Page 1

SOME CURIOUS ANIMALS.

It is Slid that every dog lias his day. Biology confirms the proverb and extends it to animals in general But many animals, and plants also, kid their day long ago, and died off peaceably or in terror at its dose, leaving only a few strange hones or the imprint of a feather or the mould of a loot to be a record of their works and days. These liad their day when the alligator basked in the Isle of Wight, when the hippopotami bellowed in the Thames, when the paleotheria browsed over the marshes of Montnmrtre. In tho unenlightened days tlie race was to the swift and the strong. The weakest went to tlie wall in spito of their huge bulk or horrifying appearance. But here and there, I in some chance refuge of the earth, strange forms lingered on from age to age, and have come down to us in their living descendants, perhaps hardly changed at all, perhaps modified out of all knowledge. i'rieeless these are then to the Biologists, for tliey often work out in tho plainest way tho path of evolution, isolated areas, whore the struggle for a crust was least keen, became their refuge, and lienco Australia is the homo of several. Uur living mommies, the platypus, the echidna, aT« thus "missing links" between tho Teptiles that preceded and the mammals that came after them. They lay reptilian eggs and hatch their young from them, and in structure they are full of tranitional forms. The marsupial wolf of Tasmania, the thylacine, tiger wolf, zebra wolf, as it has been called from the 16 black bands on its tawny back, is a curious creature doomed to extinction. It has no great toe, and a strange inflexible tail. The mud fish lingers on in Queensland, and in one or two other but widely-separated areas,, as the representative of the early days of fish. In New Zealand is the tuatara, the solo survivor of a huge race of lizards provided with a great eye in the centre of their heads (for bi-lateral symmetry is one of Nature's afterthoughts), sometimes, indeed, carrying it at the end of a long stalk as certain crustaceans do now. In tlie quarries of Montmartro Cuvier unearthed a heavy beast, about tho size of a horse, with 44 teeth, a, foot of three toes, a dun coat spotted witli yellow. To find his surviving representative we have to hark to the tapir of Malay, or the four kindred species found in South America. The Malay species is said to be the most curiously colored beast in the world, lending a lurther bizarrerie to his antediluvian look. His head and front are black, the back half of him is white. When he lies down he looks like a grey boulder. The plated armadillos of the Argentine are degenerate descendants of a once formidable race of beasts, and another South, American form, one that has undergone strange adaptation to a strange mode of life, is the vampire bat tliat lives only by sucking blood, it has lost its molar teeth, retaining only sharp incisors. It can no longer swallow any solid food, for its gullet will hardly admit a bristle. It has not, therefore, much need of a stomach, and this lias consequently become a mere loop of the intestines. There is a curious report that animals bitten by it bleed to death, and it may be tiia-t its saliva prevents coagulation, the forming of a blood clot, i here is a curious poisonous substance in the blood of eels that acts in this way. Sometimes the ages play havoc with one of these old animals that linger on among new races and ther minds. 'thus we have a. few that are first cousins I j tiie founders of tlm vertebrates, but jl these balanoglossus is a lowly sandworui and rhadopleura and cephalodiscus are marine lorms wliuoo connections with th« most advanced phylum of nature would never be guessed. But other primitive vertebrates like aseidians have tared still worse. The uninitiated mistake them fcr sea-weeds.