San Antonio daily light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1886-1907, 1894-02-03
ANIMALS GROWING SMALLER
Elephants of the Tertiary Period Monsters
Beside Those Of To-Day.

Elephants of the Tertiary Period Monsters
Beside Those of To-Day.
Compared with their extinct allies
tory, it may be laid down as a general
rule that the large animals Of the
present day are decidedly inferior in
point of size. During the later por-
ton of the tertiary period, for in
stance, before the incoming Of tho
glacial epoch, when mammals appear
TO have attained their maximum de-
velopment, there lived elephants along
side of which ordinary individuals of
the existing species would have looked
almost dwarfs, while the cave bear and
the cave hyena attained considerably
larger dimensions than their living
representatives, and some Of the saber-
toothed tigers must have been ,consid-
erably larger than the biggest
African lion or Bengal lion.
Again, the remains of red deer, bison
and wild oxen, disinterred from the
cavern and other superficial deposits of
this country, indicate animals far SUI
perior in size to their degenerate de-
scendants of the present day, while
some of the extinct pigs from the
Siwalik hills of northern India might
be compared in stature to a tapir rather
than to an ordinary wild boar. The
same story is told by reptiles, the giant
tortoise of the Siwalik hills, in spite Of
its dimensions having been considers
bly, exaggerated, greatly exceeding in
size tina Ia liuinn NJ fpHt1isA -
either the MaScarene or the Galapagos
islands, The latter rocks have also
yielded the remains Of a long-snouted
crocodile, allied to the gavial of the
Gauges, which probably measured from
fifty to sixty feet in length, whereas il
is doubtful if any existing member of
the order exceeds half the smaller
of these dimensions. If, more
over, we took into account totally ex-
tinct types, such as the megatheres
and mylodons of South America, and
contrasted them with their nearest
living allies-in this instance the sloths
and anteaters-the discrepancy in size
would be still more marked, but such
Q comparison would scarcely be anal
ogous to the above.
To every rule there Is, however, an
exception, and there are few groups
OF living large mammals whose exist
ing members appear never to have
been surpassed in size by their fossil
relative. Foremost among these are
the whales, which now appear to in
clude the largest members of the order
which have ever existed. The So
called white or square-mouthed rhi-
noosros of South Africa seems also to be
fully equal in size to any of its extinct
ancestors, and the same is certainly
true of the giraffe, which may even
exceed all its predecessors in
this respect. Whether, however, the
fossil giraffes were or were not the
equals in height of the largest indi-
viduals of the living species, there is
NO question but that the latter is by
far the tallest of all living mammals,
and that it was only riyaled in this re-
spect among exstinct forms by its
aforesaid ancestors. Moreover, if we
exclude creatures like some of the gi.
gantic dinOsaurian reptiles of the Sec
ondary epoch, which, so to speak,
gained an unfair advantage as regards
height by sitting up On their hind legs
in a kangaroo-lilSe manner, and limit
our comparison to such as walk on all
four feet in the good old-fashioned
way, we shall find that giraffes are not
only the tallest mammals, but likewise
the tallest of all animals that have
ever existed.