14 HUNTING EXTINCT ANIMALS 



Europe. Did they and their contemporaries also pass on 

 into South America? If not, where did the numerous 

 kinds of South American animals come from? Africa 

 via the Antartic continent or by the way of a trans-Atlantic 

 land bridge has been suggested. The presence of mar- 

 supial bones has suggested Australia as a partial source of 

 these animals. One point is agreed upon. South America 

 was isolated from Eocene times until about the ice age, 

 when the present Isthmus of Panama rose and made a 

 pathway by which the recent forms like the puma, wild 

 cats, dogs, foxes, skunks, etc., the guanaco, deer, tapir, 

 etc., entered that continent, and came into competition 

 with those hosts of strange and gigantic creatures of which 

 the sloths, armadilloes, and ant-eaters are the diminutive 

 representatives. But the origin of these typical South 

 American forms is still unknown. 



Darwin in his famous voyage around the world found 

 and called attention to their bones in Argentine Republic^ 

 both in the north about Buenos Aires and to the south 

 near the Straits of Magellan. Later Carl Ameghino 

 traveled through Patagonia and found more. It was 

 from his notes and collections that his brother Florentino 

 described more than a hundred different sorts of peculiar 

 and typical South American animals ancestral to the 

 above mentioned types. He went further and found 

 that the more distant ancestors of his South American 

 types were related to the more primitive ancestral animals 

 of North America, Europe, and Africa. The beds in 

 which these ancestors were found were "earlier" than those 

 in which similar forms were found anywhere else; there- 

 fore, he concluded. South America was the original home 

 of most families of animals. This of course drew attention 

 to Patagonia where the more primitive types were found. 

 In 1896 Princeton University sent an expedition to the 

 Straits of Magellan, which worked from there northward 

 for about 400 miles as far as the Deseado (Desire) River. 



