A history of land mammals in the western hemisphere

The term _Mammal_ has no exact equivalent in the true vernacular of any modern language, the word itself, like its equivalents, the French _Mammifère_ and the German _Säugethier...

Palæontology is the science of ancient life, animal and vegetable, the Zoölogy and Botany of the past, and deals with fossils. Fossils are the recognizable remains or traces of...

The terminology and nomenclature of science form a great barrier, which only too often shuts out the educated layman from following the course of investigation and keeping abrea...

With very rare exceptions, and those only of the latest geological period (Quaternary), the fossil remains of mammals consist only of bones and teeth. The evolutionary changes,...

In the interior regions of western North America the transition from the Mesozoic to the Cenozoic was so gradual that there is great difficulty in drawing the line between them...

To every one who has paid the slightest attention to the subject, it is a familiar fact that different parts of the earth have different animals; school-children learn from thei...

The natural method of telling a story is to begin at the beginning and go on to the end, but to deal in that manner with the many different assemblages of mammals which have in...

In attempting to trace the evolutionary history of the various mammalian groups, it is necessary to bear in mind the inevitable limitations of work of this kind. Speaking of pla...

The artiodactyls are and for a very long time have been a very much larger and more variegated group than the perissodactyls, and the Old World has been and still is their headq...

Utterly foreign as the elephant-tribe appears to be to present-day North America, it was a very conspicuous element in the fauna of that continent from the middle Miocene to the...

These are two orders of hoofed animals which long ago vanished from the earth and no member of either is known to have survived later than the Eocene epoch; both were of great a...

It is a regrettable circumstance that, while the successive Tertiary faunas are very fully represented in South America, approximately complete skeletons have, as yet, been obta...

Besides the four well-defined groups which make up the †Toxodontia (or †Notoungulata) there are two other extinct orders of indigenous South American ungulates, which remain to...

The story of the hoofed mammals, as sketched in brief outline in the preceding chapters (VIII-XIII), is a curious mixture of relatively full and satisfactory paragraphs, with sc...

This order embraces the lemurs, monkeys, man-like apes and Man, though in the general account Man will be omitted from consideration. The Primates are clothed in dense fur or sh...

As here employed, excluding the so-called edentates of the Old World, the Edentata form a highly variegated, but natural, assemblage of related forms. The order is at present ex...

The marsupials are a group of more primitive structure and greater antiquity than any which we have yet considered, so primitive, indeed, that they are referred to a separate in...

Throughout this book the theory of evolution has been taken for granted, as it seemed superfluous to present an outline of the evidence upon which that theory rests. “Descent wi...

John Day, 249; low Miocene, 237; Neotropical, =283=, 610; Oligocene, 237; Paraná, 227; Pleistocene, N. America, =193=, 207; Pleisto., S. Amer., =211=, 226, 597; Puerco, 285; San...