The Fauna of America^ 



By Austin H. Clark 



Associate in Zoology, U. S. National Museum 



[With 8 plates] 



Europeans seeing North America for the first time when the forests 

 were untouched and game was plentiful found many types of animals 

 familiar to them in Europe, together with others wholly new and 

 strange. In the South, and especially the Southwest, they saw fewer 

 familiar creatures and many more unfamiliar ones. To the early 

 Spanish and Portuguese explorers and conquistadores South America 

 was a wonderland in every way. The wealth of silver and gold in the 

 western mountains was matched by the incredible wealth of strange 

 mammals, queer fishes, and unusual and brilliantly colored birds and 

 butterflies. Sloths, armadillos, anteaters, opossums, tapirs, hum- 

 mingbirds, toucans, the giant condor, macaws, the large vivid blue 

 morpho butterflies, the domesticated llama, alpaca, guinea pig, and 

 ISIuscovy duck, and many other types were wholly different from any- 

 thing they had seen in Europe or in Africa. 



GEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF AMERICA 



The characteristic features of the American fauna can be under- 

 stood and appreciated only in the light of its geological and geographi- 

 cal background. Many millions of years ago in Cretaceous time North 

 America was broadly connected with northeastern Asia, and in the 

 south it was joined through Central America with northwestern South 

 America. A narrow sea extended from the region of the Mackenzie 

 River Delta in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south, covering 

 Yucatan, most of the Gulf States, southern Georgia, northern Florida, 

 and the Coastal Plain as far as Cape Cod. Early in the Eocene the 

 connection with South America was interrupted, and the sea connect- 

 ing the Gulf of Mexico with the Arctic Ocean disappeared. In the 

 Miocene, North America became separated from Asia, Later, in the 

 Pliocene, the connection with South America was reestablished. In 



1 Reprinted In somewhat extended form, by permission of the editors, from three articles 

 published (in Hebrew) In the Eucyclopaedla Hebralca, Jerusalem, 1951. 



287 



