Animal Resurrection

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22540, 3 October 1936, Page 8 (Supplement)

Animal Resurrection

By Isahel cium

Tn wandering through a museum ono often sees the vast articulated forms of great beasts or binta or reptiles which lived in far-off prehistoric times, and one wonders where such perfect specimens could bo found since their originals have vanished from the face of the earth countless ages ago. Yet these great skeletons stand there, sometimes only a bony framework, sometimes clothed in fur or hair, with a strange semblance of life which seems to indicate that tLey must liave onco lived and moved about the forest or the plains. As indeed they did, and it is to the art and research of man that we owe such knowledge of the extinct beasts and birds as we now possess. There are spots on the earth's surface which are peculiarly rich in fossilised remains of extinct animals, and an American writer gives us an extremely interesting account of one of these where literally millions of bones have been unearthed. This area is near a large populous city in California and is now the site of thriving oil wells, where but a stone's throw from busy city streets, thronged with rushing motor-cars and clanging electric trams, are deep pits of seething liquid asphalt bubbling and shimmering and writhing like the boiling slime of our Hot Lakes mud-pools/ Woe betide any unfortunate bird or insect or animal blundering into this gluey morass for they are doomed to stick fast there ; their frantic struggles to escape growing weaker and weaker until they perish of exhaustion or suffocation. hi this way, the scientists believe, perished countless hordes of beasts in this terrible animal trap throughout the ages, for it is here that piles upon piles of animal remains have been found and patiently put together by the skill of man. Aeons and aeons ago, the scientists say, all this area of countrv was covered by the ocean, a fact which is proved by shells and other marine deposits still to be found in successive layers in the mountains. Gradually the seas receded, or perhaps suddenly, in some hideous convulsion of nature which heaved up mountains and gouged out deep canyons, and in course of time the naked earth became clothed in impenetrable forest. Here the sabre-toothed tiger—the veritable Old Man Tiger of prehistoric times —roamed the wastes in savage might; huge elephants trumpeted and trampled through the thorny jungles, mastodons

and mammoths, wolves and lions, and all manner of ferocious beasts fought for an existence before the stone ace of man began. When that great pit of hissing pitch began to form, welling up out of the subterranean depths, who can say? And how so many beasts blundered into it can only bo conjeeiured, but the scientists think that the.y were probably attracted to it in tropio weather, believing it to be water ti it shone in the sun, heaving and glittering. If so, they must have soon realised their dreadful mistake and paid the penalty in a lingering and horrible death in that black viscid lake of Stygian slime. What an appalling picture it calls up to the mind's eye, enormous mas. give elephants foundering to their death in that bottomless pit with agonised trumpetings of rage and terror, snarling tigers with bared fangs" and eyes like live coals clawing: futiiely at the clinging glutinous mass like drowning rats, reduced at last to distraught whines and whimpers of despair, lions with their terrible roarings choked in their throats, howling wolves, and giant vultures with mired wings fluttering madly in the attempt to rise, but all sinking, sinking despite their despeiate struggles to escape. All that is known for a certainty is that the bones are there, millions of them in unending supply, and that scientific investigation has brought to light all kind of fossil remains, not only beasts and birds and reptiles, but most delicate leaves and flowers and fragile insects, imperishably preserved in this great natural preservative. The hones, when recovered, are cleaned by boiling in oil, and then clever fingers assemble them until the men and women and boys and girls of to-day can see the replicas of the almost fabnious beasts which roamed the earth long before man's most remote ancestor came with his bows and arrows, flints and spears to make war upon them. Thev are all there in that monstrous pit, lion, wolf and tiger, serpent and bird, elephant and insect, and their reassembled forms are sent out to all parts of the world for exhibition. The fact that no bones prehistoric man seem to have been found there may he a proof of his superior brain power or cunning which taught him to avoid the great pit and so saved him from the dreadful fate which overtook the animals.