Dark Is Before the Dawn 357 



there is very good reason to believe that the answer to the former is 

 in the positive. When you come to sum up all the characteristics of 

 whale anatomy, especially certain of their peculiarities — like their 

 complex multiple stomachs and simple livers — and compare them 

 with those of the other existing orders of mammals, you will find, 

 and this is perhaps most surprising of all, that they have more in 

 common with the order called the Artiodactyla, or the "ungulates 

 with an odd number of toes," which is composed of the horses, tapirs, 

 and rhinoceroses. The evidence for this is both logical and plain to 

 palaeontologists and anatomists, but may well sound farfetched to 

 others. Therefore, I will attempt to sum it up briefly. 



Let us start with four of the major groups or "orders," of living 

 mammals — the whales, the hoofed mammals with an odd number of 

 toes, the hoofed mammals with an even number of toes (pigs, deer, 

 cattle, antelopes, and so on), and the carnivores, or flesh-eaters (cats, 

 dogs, bears, raccoons, hyenas, and weasels). Of these four, the two 

 groups of hoofed animals appear, at first glance, to be the most 

 closely related, while both seem to be very diflferent from the car- 

 nivores, and all three apparently have practically nothing in common 

 with the whales. However, the collection and examination of hun- 

 dreds of thousands of fossil bones of thousands of diflrerent kinds 

 of animals from rocks laid down during the past sixty million years, 

 plus two centuries of anatomical researches into the bodies of almost 

 all living members of these four groups, now clearly show that the 

 even-toed ungulates are much more closely related to the carnivores 

 than they are to the odd-toed ungulates and, in fact, have a common 

 ancestry with them, while the direct ancestors of the odd-toed ungu- 

 lates, which are called Condylarthra, or "Knuckle-jointed Ones," 

 show much closer affinities with the earliest Zeuglodonts, which 

 were, of course, whales. 



The common ancestors of the even-toed ungulates and the car- 

 nivores are called Creodonts. They were simple little doglike crea- 

 tures, the earliest having five finger? and toes, and a long tail. What 

 they arose from we do not yet know. We also do not know the 

 common ancestor of the Zeuglodonts, on the one hand, or of the 

 Condylarthra, on the other. Nevertheless, there must once have 

 been both such creatures, and it is a positive axiom that those two in 

 turn must also have had a common ancestor in still earlier times, 



