NATURAL HISTORY NOTES

Evening Star, Issue 12883, 4 August 1906, Page 2

NATURAL HISTORY NOTES

A PEEP AT SOME CREATURES OF THE PAST.

■ Thirgs old have a strange fascination Hfor mest people—old china, old coins, old ■pictures, and old books. The mere age Micems to give these things a special in- ■ terest; one cannot see them without being H.sarned hack to the age in which they were ■produced and without wondering how the ■people who made them lived and worked ■and thought. But if this is so with things ■ of human manufacture, how much more is ■ it with the ■ lemains of animals that lived ■ many ages before man appeared on the ■ earth at all, for, compared with most of ■ these, things human have no claim to an- ■ tiquity at all. Living animals are interest- ■ mg enough, and there are many questions ■ connected with them that excite interest ■ and Pdmiration, but with extinct animals ■ there is the added charm of mystery. In- ■ stead of ha nng the whole animal before ■ S'flj i B able to learn wt i n °ut much ■ difficulty all about its structure and its H mode of life, wo have, with the creatures H of the past, only fragments—perhaps a m piece of bona, a tooth, or a bit of the shell, H and from these we have to reconstruct the W animal and, by comparison with others ■ that we know in the living state, to ima- ■ gine how the creature looked when the ■j bones were clothed with flesh and skin, ■ and thence to learn how it got its food ■ and maintained an existence in the strug- ■ gle with other animals living at the same ■ time. ■. But how can this be done? How can ■ anyone having before him only a few frag- ■ ments of the hard parts of an animal tell I vi» th u ani/Tul ltself mvst nav e been ■ These and many other interesting ■ questions rehting to extinct animals are ■ dealt with in the book now before us: ■ 'Extinct Animals,' by E. Ray Lankester, ■ Director of the Natuial History Depart- ■ rnent of the British Museum. The book is ■ the outcome of a series of lectures de- ■ livered to a juvenile audience at the Royal ■ Institution during the Christmas holidays ■ of 1905-04, and consists of shorthand I vi° te i 3 Uken of the lectures > illustrated by ■ blocks from the numerous lantern slides ■ that were used to illustrate them. Being ■ adapted to a juvenile audience, the lan- ■ gUHge of the bock is simple and easily ■ understood, and it may be read with plea"- ■ sure by all, whether they possess any preI nM? US , knowled g e of the subject or not. The charm of the book is greatly increased °y the numerous illustrations, many of which are new and original, for not only do these all assist in illustrating and making .clear the text, but manv of them have a distinct personal interest as well. This is the case, for example, with 6gur<js 43 and 44, which have a special interest for New Zealanders. Figure 43 is a photograph of the piece of a bone of a moa which was sent to the British Museum from New Zealand more than fifty years ago, and is still preserved in that institution. It will be remembered that this was the first specimen of anv part of a moa to reach England, and "that it fell into the hands of the late Sir Richard Owen. It was only about seven or eight inches long, but from examining it, and noticing the ridges and marks on its surface, and by comparing it with other bones with which ho was well acquainted, Owen was able to say that it was the middle piece of the thigh-bone of a large bird like an ostrich, the ends of which had been broken off, and he was able to assert with confidence that birds of this kind • must have previously existed in New Zealand. Before long other moa bones reached the British Museum, fully confirming Owen's deductions from the first piece, and in a few years from these remains he was able to put together a skeleton of a huge bird with strong, stout legs and long neck, bearing a comparatively small head at a height of ten or eleven feet from - the ground, and in figure 44 we have a photograph <>f Owen wearing his academic robes and standing beside this restored skeleton holding in his hand the piece of bone first received. Here wo see him dwarfed as regards stature by the moa towering above his head, but proud of the greatness and correctness of his deduction, based, apparently, on such inadequate data. This example will enable us to some extent to answer the questions asked above. The shape of the different parts of each f animal is very constant, and if animals resemble one another in other details they , will resemble one another also in the shape and structure of the bones and other bard parts. Moreover, every part of an animal has a distinct meaning and a definite relation to all other parts. The bonts of the limbs have to support the weight of the body, and must, therefore, in their Eire and strength, depend upon the weight that they have to support. To them are . attached muscles by which they are moved, and for the attachment of these muscles there are' various ridges and roughnesses on the surface of the bones; ?k in a similar way the bone must have .f special shape and structure at the places where it articulates or forms a joint with other bones. All these things, and even the minute structure of the bone, are remarkably constant in the same kind of animal, so that if we know the puis and their relation to one another in one animal we can infer . ranch as to the form and structure of another similar animal from a small pirt of if. In the case of the moa bone that Owen had. the question was comparatively easy, for the specimen he had was a piece of the actual bone, pretty well in its natural condition ; and though the moas are extinct, they have only recently become so, and they resemble living wingless birds so closely that inferences as to the details of their structure can be made with ease and confidence. In many cases the difficulty is much greater. The fossil remains are often extremely scanty and imperfect, perhaps distorted, and imbedded in the surround' mg rock, so that only a part of them can be seen. Moreover, some of the animals long extinct are so different in type from all living forms that we have much less • certain ground for comparison. But an immense mass of facts with regard to all animals, living and extinct, is now known, and by means of this science of compara- . tive anatomy the paleontologist can generally extract a surprising amount of facts about extinct animals from very unpromis-ing-looking material. In many cases the extinct animals are nracb larger than their living representatives. For instance, the giant extinct sloths and armadillo? of South America greatly exceed the existing forms in size, the moa is many times larger than the kiwi, and Borne of the extinct marsupials of Australia are giants compared with the kangaroos and wombats now living in that country. But notwithstanding a number of facts of this kind, it would bo wrong to conclude that there is a general law that existing animals are all small and insignificant compared with their extinct ancestors. The earliest known ancestors of the mammals were probably not much larger than a dog, existing horses are bigger than the' extinct ones, and elephants are much larger than their early ancestors. There have been giant reptiles in the past like the diplodocus, wheh was excavated from rocks at Wyoming, and is now in the Carnegie Institute at Pittsburg, a model of the skeleton being in the British Museum, to which it was presented by Mr Carnegie. This huge creature was 80ft in length, and it was only one of a number of giant reptiles, for the atlantosaurus, from the Jurassic rocb of the United States, had a thigh-bone 6ft in length, as tall as a tall man, while that of a *big elephant is barely 4ft But, on the otheT hand, there never has been any creature, so faT as we know, as large as gome of the existi.'jg whales—the sperm whale, the great Airqnal, ot the whalebone whales. The fact is that at eveTy period of the ea th's history there have been animals of all kinds, some big and some little, each adapted to the" conditions under which it livid, and that there h:is been a gradual advance from animals of a simple or low type to others more and more highly developed and further up in the scale; and the group predominant at any particular . epoch naturally contained the largest number of large "forms, and when the group gradually became replaced by another group of higher organisation it was only some of the smaller forms that could, as a rule, r maintain themselves in the unequal struggle. Thus, when tfoe predominant group was that of anthropod animals, such as the Crustacea- and thei« allies, and there yrss no

higher group on the lace of the earth, we had giant Crustacea, creatures 6ft or more in length, and much larger, therefore, than the majority of existing forms. Reptiles flourished in secondary times, and tbeir jrwny was undisputed, and then lEJS tH 0 rv ™**ts of giant reptile* already referred to. In the early Tertiary tirnra a new grpnp, the mammalia, began to arise, and gradually supplanted the rep. tues so that fewer reptiles were able to exist, and consequentlv there was a smaller number of large reptiles, though under favorable circumstances a few large forms such as alligators and crocodiles still held their ground. The present is the age of mammals; they form the dominant group of ar,imak, and occupy well nigh the whole earth, and among their great numbers -ne bave a fair proportion of large forms forming in the aggregate a large number—elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses camels, giraffes, buffaloes, lions, tigers. whales, eta The proportion of large forms to the total number of animals existing at the time has probably been pretty much the same at all periods, but in all cases the majority of the large forms has belonged to the group predominant at the timo. In commencing his course of lectures, Professor Ray Lankester, in order to lead his youthful hearers gradually on to a due conception of what is meant by extinct animals and their fossil remains, gives, first of all, a number of animate that have only recently become extinct, and it is astonishing what a long list of these could easily be made up. Many have become extinct within the memory of man, and there are others that are now on the vf-rge of extinction. Thus the Great Bull or Urus (Bos primigenius) was mentioned by Julius Creear as occurring wild in soveral parts of Europe, but now no longer exists, the last having been killed near Warsaw in 1627. The quagga lived in South Africa, and wo,* common there till about forty years ago; the sea cow (Rhytina Stelleri) was found at the Aleutian Islands during the eighteenth century, but in a few years ceased to exist, its end being hastened by man's destructive habits The great auk, formerly common on the islands of the North of Scotland, and the dodo, of Mauritius, are now thing? of the past. Of animals on the verge of extinction there may be mentioned the giant tortoise of the Seychelles and other islands, the common grey wolf of Europe, and the beaver, both once common in England, but dow no longer found there and becoming rare elsewhere; while several of the large animals now wild in Africa, such as the giraffe, will soon cease to exist unless prompt measures are taken for their preservation, and it is to be feared that the same fate awaits our kiwis, tuataras. and some of the other interesting animal* of New Zealannd.

It is impossible here to follow Professor Ray Lankerter further in the interesting subjects dealt with in his couree of leaturea. After explaining in a very clear and simple manner why it is that certain animals become extinct, and how their remains come to be covered up in the earth to form fossils, and by sub-equent changes of the earth's s>urfaee are brought into positions where they can be observed by man. he goes on to five some account of the succession of lir> on the earth, starting withsome of the larger forms, such as the ancestors of the elephant, the horse, and other mammals • then rome of the most interesting of the fossil reptiles are passed in review, and_ we are led on to the fishes, and to a brief account of the fossil invertebrate animals. All of these are described in graphic language of great simplicity, and though naturally much of what is put dowr has appeared in some form or other in earlier works there are several points deidt with, such as the earlier ancestors oj the elephant and the mylodon remains from South America, that have not previously been treated of in popular form, and, coming as they do with the authority of the director of the Natural History Department of the British Museum, there is no question of their scientific accuracy and reliability. The numerous illustrations add greatly to the value of the book, and it can safely be recommended to all who wish t~> get an accurate idea of some of the moreimportant forms that have existed on the earth without going to the trouble of studying the drier details of paUeontology.