EXTINCT ANIMALS 



region of the back, like the pieces forming the 

 bony case of the arniadilloes and Glyptodons, 

 but not fitted closely together. It was sup- 

 posed that the Mylodon, hke all the gigantic 

 Edentata of South America, had long ceased 

 to exist and was extinct as long ago as the 

 mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros of our 



Fig. 123. — View, looking outwards, from the mouth of the 

 cavern on the fiord of the Ultima Speranza in Southern 

 Patagonia, in which have been found the skin and hair 

 and the bones with cartilage, blood and tendon and the 

 dung of the Mylodon and other animals, proving its 

 co-existence with man and its survival imtil a period 

 estimated variously at fifty or a thousand years ago. 



own country. But about seven years ago a 

 traveller (Dr. Nordenskj old) found in Patagonia, 

 at the end of a fiord near the Chilian coast, a 

 vast cavern (Fig. 123), and from tliis cavern the 

 white settlers living in a farm close by had re- 

 moved an enormous piece of skin (Fig. 124) 

 covered with greenish-brown hair and studded on 



174 



