THREE-HORNED SKULL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21649, 20 May 1932, Page 8

THREE-HORNED SKULL

5,000,000-YEAR-OLD RELIC DISCOVERY IN TEXAS. Another example of the strange forms of animal life which once roamed the hills and valleys of western America has just been uncovered by the University of California Department of paleontology, in the shape of a distant relative of the camel, deer, antelope, etc., which has three horns on its head instead of two. This new animal is represented by a skull dug from the Pliocene formations along Barton Creek, in Donley County, Texas. Its outstanding point of interest is a third horn in addition to two sprouting out of the skull in the normal manner for ruminants. This third horn is rooted on either side of the nostrils, grows together on top of the nostrils like tree roots coalescing into a tree .trunk, and then splits again like the branches of a tree into two parts. Its total length is about 17 inches.

A report on this odd- creature, which lived some 5,000,000 years before the Christian Era, lias just been written by R. A. Stir ton, curator of the vertebrate collections of the University Museum of Paleontology. From a scientific point of view the strange skull is of value because it adds a further chapter to the evolutionary history of a branch of the artiodactyla, or cloven-hoofed mammals, which now'have become extinct. It already was known ro science that an artiodactyl with two horns on its nose lived in, what now is South Dakota some 10.000.000 years ago. Then a more highly developed form of artiodactyl was found which lived in Nebraska seveial million years later. This form showed a tendency for the two horns to coalesce into one. Now this latest form found by the University of California demonstrates that in the course of evolution the horns on the nose did grow together-