VEETEBEATE PALEONTOLOGY 223 



who for half a century stood without a peer as the 

 greatest of authorities on fossil mammals. It was the 

 Natural History of the British Fossil Mammals and 

 Birds, published in 1846, that established Sir Richard's 

 reputation. 



Eussia has produced much mammalian material, 

 especially from the Tertiary of Odessa and Bessarabia, 

 and from the Quaternary of northern Eussia and Siberia. 

 These have been described mainly by J. F. Brandt, A. 

 von Nordmann, but especially by Mme. M. Pavlow of 

 Moscow. 



Forsyth-Major discovered in 1887 a fauna contem- 

 poraneous with that of Pikermi in the Island of Samos 

 in the Mediterranean. 



One of the most remarkable recent discoveries of fossil 

 localities was that announced in 1901 by Mr. Hugh J. L. 

 Beadnell of the Geological Survey of Egypt and Doctor 

 C. W. Andrews of the British Museum of London, of 

 numerous land and sea mammals of Upper Eocene and 

 Lower Oligocene age in northern Egypt. The exposures 

 lay about 80 miles southwest of Cairo in the Fayum dis- 

 trict and are the sediments of an ancient Tertiary lake, a 

 relic of which, Birket-el-Qurun, yet remains. These beds 

 contained ancient Hyracoidea, Sirenia, and Zeuglodontia, 

 but above all, ancestral Proboscidea which, together with 

 those known elsewhere, enabled Andrews to demonstrate 

 the origin and evolutionary features of this most remark- 

 able group of beasts. This discovery in the Fayum lends 

 color to the belief that Africa may have been the ancestral 

 home of at least five of the mammalian orders, those men- 

 tioned above, together with the Embrithopoda, a group 

 unknown elsewhere. This theory had been advanced 

 independently by Tullberg, Stehlin, and Osborn, before 

 the discovery in Egypt. 



Another European worker of pre-eminence who wrote 

 more broadly than the faunal studies mentioned above 

 was W. Kowalewsky. He discussed especially the evo- 

 lutionary changes of feet and teeth in ungulates, a line of 

 research afterward developed in greater detail by the 

 Americans, Cope and Osborn. 



South America has yielded series of rich faunas which 

 have been exploited by the great Argentinian, Florentine 



