The Great Size Of The Bones Of The Megatheroid Animals,
Including The Megatherium, Megalonyx, Scelidotherium, And
Mylodon, Is Truly Wonderful.
The habits of life of these
animals were a complete puzzle to naturalists, until Professor
Owen [4] solved the problem with remarkable ingenuity.
The
teeth indicate, by their simple structure, that these Megatheroid
animals lived on vegetable food, and probably on the
leaves and small twigs of trees; their ponderous forms and
great strong curved claws seem so little adapted for locomotion,
that some eminent naturalists have actually believed,
that, like the sloths, to which they are intimately related,
they subsisted by climbing back downwards on trees, and
feeding on the leaves. It was a bold, not to say preposterous,
idea to conceive even antediluvian trees, with branches
strong enough to bear animals as large as elephants. Professor
Owen, with far more probability, believes that, instead
of climbing on the trees, they pulled the branches down to
them, and tore up the smaller ones by the roots, and so fed on
the leaves. The colossal breadth and weight of their hinder
quarters, which can hardly be imagined without having been
seen, become on this view, of obvious service, instead of
being an incumbrance: their apparent clumsiness disappears.
With their great tails and their huge heels firmly fixed like
a tripod on the ground, they could freely exert the full force
of their most powerful arms and great claws. Strongly
rooted, indeed, must that tree have been, which could have
resisted such force! The Mylodon, moreover, was furnished
with a long extensile tongue like that of the giraffe, which,
by one of those beautiful provisions of nature, thus reaches
with the aid of its long neck its leafy food. I may remark,
that in Abyssinia the elephant, according to Bruce, when it
cannot reach with its proboscis the branches, deeply scores
with its tusks the trunk of the tree, up and down and all
round, till it is sufficiently weakened to be broken down.
The beds including the above fossil remains, stand only
from fifteen to twenty feet above the level of high-water;
and hence the elevation of the land has been small (without
there has been an intercalated period of subsidence, of which
we have no evidence) since the great quadrupeds wandered
over the surrounding plains; and the external features of
the country must then have been very nearly the same as
now. What, it may naturally be asked, was the character
of the vegetation at that period; was the country as wretchedly
sterile as it now is? As so many of the co-embedded
shells are the same with those now living in the bay, I was
at first inclined to think that the former vegetation was
probably similar to the existing one; but this would have
been an erroneous inference for some of these same shells
live on the luxuriant coast of Brazil; and generally, the
character of the inhabitants of the sea are useless as guides
to judge of those on the land.
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