CHAPTER X 



HISTORY OF THE PROBOSCIDEA 



Utterly foreign as the elephant-tribe appears to be to 

 present-day North America, it was a very conspicuous element 

 in the fauna of that continent from the middle Miocene to the 

 end of the Pleistocene, and in the latter epoch it spread over 

 South America also. Like so many others of the mammals 

 which have, from time to time, flourished in the Americas, the 

 elephants and their allies, the f mastodons, were immigrants 

 from the Old World, and, until comparatively lately, the region 

 of their origin was a complete mystery. They appeared sud- 

 denly and unheralded and at approximately the same time in 

 Europe and North America and nothing is known from pre- 

 ceding geological formations of either continent which could 

 with any plausibility be regarded as ancestral to them. The 

 mystery was dispelled by the discoveries of Dr. C. W. Andrews 

 in Egypt, which demonstrated that these strange and huge 

 beasts had originated in Africa and had migrated thence through 

 Asia to Europe, on the one side, and to North America on the 

 other. 



The proboscideans occupy a very isolated position among the 

 hoofed mammals, and in structure they display a curious min- 

 gling of high specialization with an extreme conservatism of 

 primitive characters, the specialization being exemplified in 

 the teeth and head and the conservatism in the body and limbs, 

 very much as in the foreodont family of artiodactyls (p. 382). 

 The most conspicuous of the external features in the order is 

 the long trunk, or proboscis, which gives its name to the group, 

 and is a great prolongation of the nose, with the nostrils at the 



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