. The evolution of the earth and its inhabitants; a series delivered before the Yale chapter of the Sigma xi during the academic year 1916-1917. se. Among these latter, the amblypods, were the swamp-dwelling Coryphodon (PL IV, B) and the later Dinocerata(PL IV, C), with conservative molar teeth and feet and ab-surdly small brain, coupled with elephantine bulk and propor-tions of body and limbs, but with what was superficially ahighly specialized skull having many horn-like prominencesand sabre-like canine teeth—a veneer of specialization over aprimitive type. The flesh-eaters were in some resp
. The evolution of the earth and its inhabitants; a series delivered before the Yale chapter of the Sigma xi during the academic year 1916-1917. se. Among these latter, the amblypods, were the swamp-dwelling Coryphodon (PL IV, B) and the later Dinocerata(PL IV, C), with conservative molar teeth and feet and ab-surdly small brain, coupled with elephantine bulk and propor-tions of body and limbs, but with what was superficially ahighly specialized skull having many horn-like prominencesand sabre-like canine teeth—a veneer of specialization over aprimitive type. The flesh-eaters were in some respects better equipped thantheir plant-feeding contemporaries, but they, like the others,were, if one may judge from skull capacity, notoriously dull and AND ITS INHABITANTS 135 stupid compared with the shrewdness of their modern sup-planters (Fig. 26). Incursion of the modernized mammals. The archaic mam-mals barely survived the Eocene, only one group, the hyasno-donts, being found in Oligocene rocks. Early in the Eocene,however, are seen the vanguard of an army of invaders, noneof which seem directly related to the native mammals. Their. FIG. 26.—Restoration of the creodont, Dromocyon. After Osborn, fromLulls Organic Evolution, published by the Macmillan Company. simultaneous appearance in North America and Europepoints to a contiguous center of evolution somewhere to thenorth, either a circumpolar land or the northern part of whatis now Asia. Here they underwent their primal evolution andhere they were endowed with the highest potentialities alongthe three directions wherein the archaic mammals oscillation in the north in the early Tertiary drovethese modernized mammals south along the three continentalradii, not all at once, but in a series of drives, until the competi- 136 EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH tion became too severe for the native inhabitants to of the native stocks by such an invading army isimpossible among animals, however it may
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