THE ANIMAL WORLD OF BRAZIL 



America are the Edentata, "the Toothless," so-called because they 

 have few teeth, or none ; and from this alone we perceive that they 

 are degenerating. He who has once seen an Anteater, with its long- 

 haired, black and white coat and its huge plumy tail, and has 

 watched the great creature holding its head, slender as a stick and 

 curved like a sabre, to the ground, in order to seek its food with its 

 worm-like tongue, will agree with Carus Sterne that it looks like a 

 creature of hoary antiquity, no longer quite adapted to our age, 

 whose race has been isolated by the dying out of its many relatives. 



And indeed, in the Tertiary period, and even in the pre-Tertiary, 

 the Edentata played a very different part in South America ! It was 

 with amazement that I saw the giant Armadillos and Sloths of that 

 period in the museum of La Plata, the pleasant University town to 

 the south of Buenos Aires (Plate 26). In a well-lighted, semicircular 

 hall surrounding the body of the museum stand these giant creatures, 

 some of them large as elephants, marshalled in rows under their 

 glass cases, as though struck motionless while marching into eternity. 

 Here, gleaming white, is the monstrous tortoise-like shell of the 

 Glyptodon, built up of finely-chiselled plates of bone ; behind it is 

 the menacing tail, armoured with spiked rings, and before it the 

 head is outstretched, likewise armoured with bony plates. Now 

 come the giant Sloths, in size and weight rivalling the great Arma- 

 dillos; here is the Megatherium, "monstrously lazy, monstrously 

 large," which could never, of course, have hung from the boughs 

 of the Imbauba-tree, as Scheffel supposed, for the slender tree would 

 at once have been shattered by its weight ! Relatives of the Mega- 

 therium, the Mylodon and the Gryptotherium, were, it would seem, 

 kept by man as a sort of living provision for the winter, since their 

 remains have been found in Patagonian caves, together with unmis- 

 takable traces of human occupation. Many scientists believe that 

 man has been responsible for the extirpation of these mighty 

 creatures, defenceless for all their size and their bony armour. 

 Since the remains of armadillo-like forms have been found in the 

 older Tertiary deposits in North America, and even in France, the 

 Edentata must have found their way hither from the North, but it 

 was only in South America that they reached their full development. 



To-day three families of these creatures are still extant in South 

 America; the Armadillos or Tatus, the Anteaters or Tamanduas, 

 and the Sloths or Preguigas (Plate 27). Of these animals, the Ant- 

 eaters are exclusively insectivorous, while the Armadillos eat fruits 

 and roots as well as insects, and the Sloths live entirely on the 



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