350 EESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 



South America, in antediluvian times, had gigantic sloths and 

 tapirs, akin to the animals now found within her limits. Each 

 continent has a fauna of its own, to which its antediluvian ani- 

 mals were nearly akin. Every continent has several zoological 

 districts ; and the ancient and modern fauna of these districts 

 are sometimes as clearly related to each other, and as distinctly 

 separate from those of other parts of the continent, as are the 

 fauna of different continents from each other. But the ante- 

 diluvian animals of California possessed no peculiar relation- 

 ship to the animals now indigenous to the State : the former 

 fauna was totally distinct from that of the present age ; the 

 fossil bones found are not numerous, and no large and valuable 

 skeletons have been brought to light, but many fragments. 

 None of the large saurians those wonderful lizards, as large 

 as whales of an early geological era have yet been found here ; 

 but our hills and mountains contain the bones of the mastodon, 

 elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, horse, camel, whale, and 

 a quadruped resembling a tapir. Oyster-shells fifteen inches 

 long are found near Corral Hollow, and Oyster Peak near Mt. 

 Diablo is named after its fossils. Ammonites abound in 

 Shasta County, some of them a foot and a half in diameter. 

 The climate of California must have been tropical in the era 

 of this extinct fauna ; and then our valleys were great swamps ; 

 and our mountains were covered with a luxuriance of vegeta- 

 tion that now belongs to the equatorial regions. 



279. Post-Pliocene Man. Many evidences that man ex- 

 isted as early as the post-Pliocene era, have been found in 

 California ; and Amos Bowman claims that he was here in 

 Pliocene times. Near the town of Altaville, in Calaveras 

 County, part of the skull of a man was found in a post-Pliocene 

 formation, under four successive strata of lava, at a depth 

 of 131 feet from the surface, in a miner's shaft. The first 

 stratum was of black lava, forty feet deep ; then gravel, three 

 feet ; light lava, thirty feet ; gravel, five feet ; light lava, fifteen 

 feet; gravel, twenty-five feet ; dark-brown lava, nine feet ; and 



