MAMMALIA ABUNDANT. 93 



as the seventieth degree of latitude. The mammoth also in- 

 habited North America. Its chief external peculiarity was a 

 pair of long curved tusks extending forwards and upwards 

 from the upper jaw. The numerous remains of the animal in 

 the most superficial strata, and the discovery (in 1801) of a 

 specimen with its flesh and hide entire in a mass of ice at the 

 mouth of the Lena in Siberia, show that it must have lived 

 down to comparatively modern times. 



The pliocene gives many other new families. From remains 

 which have been found, however fragmentary in many cases, 

 there cannot be a doubt that all the principal mammalian 

 forms, except the highest and a few others, now existed 

 throughout the earth, and in species which only differed from 

 those still living in slight peculiarities, chiefly of dentition. 

 Bears, badgers, hyenas, and feline animals : moles and other 

 insectivores ; otters and weasels ; the wolf and dog ; then 

 roamed for prey as now ; besides an extinct felina, the machai- 

 rodus, possessing teeth like curved saws. England had 

 beavers and bears, little different from living species ; only, 

 one of the former family was of huge bulk. We also had the 

 hippopotamus and rhinoceros. Oxen, deer, camels, etc., in- 

 habited the great zoological province with which we are con- 

 nected ; and monkeys and apes passed far beyond the tropical 

 regions to which they are now confined. In India, besides 

 the pachyderms of the European eocene, there were ruminants 



FIG. 69. 



Skull of Sivatherium. 



