32 
ORIGIN OF LIFE IN AMERICA 
being part of the indigenous fauna, yet we recognise that their 
ancestors must have entered the continent from Asia in com¬ 
paratively recent geological times. 
Let us take for example the moose deer (A Ices americanus). 
Its range extends from, Bering Strait, in a broad tract of forest 
land eastward, along the northern shores of the Great Lakes 
as far as Nova Scotia on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Only 
along the Rocky Mountains, as Mr. Thompson Seton has so 
clearly indicated in his map of the range (Fig. 3), does the 
moose occur further south.* 
There are a few historical records, and also some fossil 
ones, which indicate that the moose once penetrated further 
into the United States in various directions, but it evidently 
never diverged very much from its present r.ange.f The bones 
of a couple of closely allied animals have been met with in the 
Pleistocene deposits of Washington territory, and the skeleton 
of a peculiar moose, somewhat resembling the Alaskan variety, 
has been discovered in the Pleistocene of New Jersey, and 
placed by Professor Scott into a distinct genus (Cervalces). 
Whether this animal was ancestral to the living moose, as 
has been suggested, or whether it represents an aberrant 
type which has come in from Siberia with the moose, as Mr. 
Grant seems to think likely, are problems which may be 
left to future researches.J Certain it is that when we cross 
Bering Strait into Northern Asia, we meet with a moose 
(Alces bedfordiae) which in its simple antlers somewhat 
resembles the young American moose. Further west as far as 
Scandinavia, we find another species (A. machlis) differing 
but slightly from Alces americanus. It seems almost as if 
the moose had originated in eastern Asia from some more 
generalised type like xAlces bedfordiae, and had gradually 
produced the forms with more palmated antlers in America 
and Europe by a process of convergent evolution. In any 
case, we are led to assume that Bering Strait was dry land 
when the ancestors of the existing moose entered the New 
World. Even if we suppose the moose to have originated in 
America, a land bridge connecting the latter with Asia was a 
* Seton, Thompson, “Life Histories of Northern Animals, I.,” p. 151. 
t Grant, Madison, “Moose.” 
f Grant, Madison, “ Origin and Relation of Mammals,” p. 23. 
