The Zoology of North American Big Game 



The last of our three anomalies, the white, or 

 mountain goat (Oreamnos montanus}, is not as 

 completely orphaned as the other two, for it seems 

 quite surely to be connected with a small and pecu- 

 liar series consisting of the European chamois 

 and several species of Nemorhadus inhabiting 

 eastern Asia and Sumatra. These are often called 

 mountain antelopes, or goat antelopes. So little is 

 yet known of the soft anatomy of the white goat 

 that we are much in the dark as to its minute re- 

 semblances, but its glandular system is certainly 

 suggestive of the chamois, and many of its attitudes 

 are strikingly similar. In all the points in which it 

 approaches goats it is like some, at least, among 

 antelopes, while in the elongated spines of the an- 

 terior dorsal vertebrae, which support the hump, 

 and in extreme shortness of the cannon bone, it is 

 far from goat-like. The goat idea, indeed, has 

 little more foundation than the suggestive resem- 

 blance of the profile with its caprine beard. 

 It is truly no goat at all, and should more properly 

 be regarded as an aberrant antelope, if anything 

 could be justly termed "aberrant" in an aggrega- 

 tion of animals, hardly any two of which agree in 

 all respects of structure. No American fossils seem 

 to point to Oreamnos, and as Nemorhadus ex- 

 tends to Japan and eastern Siberia, it is probable 



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