River Falls journal. [volume] (River Falls, Pierce County, Wis.) 1872-2019, 1894-01-18
ANIMALS GROWING SMALLER.
Elephants OF the Tertiary Period Monsters
Beside Those of TODAY

| csioo iHose OF Holiday.
Compared with their extinct allies
of earlier periods of the earth's his
| 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 the
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 saher-
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 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
It's dimensions having been considera-
bly, exaggerated, greatly exceeding in
size the largest living giant tortoise of
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
ianges. which probably measured from
fifty to sixty feet in length, whereas it
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
,ontrasted them with their nearest
living allies-in this instance the sloths
md anteaters-the discrepancy in size
would be still more marked. but such
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-
noceros 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-
giduals of the living species, there is
40 question but that the latter is by
tar the tallest of all living mammals,
and that it was only rivaled in this re-
spect among exstinct forms by it's
aforesaid ancestors. Moreover, if we
exclude creatures like some of the gil
gantic dinosaurian reptiles of the sec
9ndary epoch, which, so to speak,
gained an unfair advantage as regards
height by sitting up on their hind legs
in a kangaroo-lilxe 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. -Knowledge.