EVOLUTION OF ELEPHANTS 359 



In connection with the catastrophe which seems to have 

 overtaken the luckless animals whose fossil remains have 

 been dug out of the asphalt beds at Rancho La Brea, it is 

 not uninteresting to learn from a Californian who lived 

 many years ago on a ranch directly opposite La Brea, that 

 cattle and even squirrels sometimes came to grief on his 

 ranch, being swallowed up by the earth in a similar way, 

 especially in wet weather. So swampy was the soil that 

 no bottom could be touched when a long pole was driven 

 down through it. Although he states that there was no 

 asphaltum on his ranch, still his experience illustrates the 

 possibility of animals sinking to their death in traversing 

 a treacherous soil along, or in the immediate neighbourhood, 

 of the great fault running through this region.* 



A tract of 32 acres, covering these fossil beds, has recently 

 been donated to Los Angeles County, by Mr. Hancock, for 

 park purposes. The more or less restored pits will thus 

 have beautiful surroundings and will become a point of 

 pilgrimage for scientists. 



The La Brea mastodon and mammoth are undoubtedly 

 Pleistocene, but the numerous fragmentary remains found 

 in the gold-bearing gravels and elsewhere in California 

 are many of them older. Pliocene or perhaps Miocene. To 

 these older species probably belong the various teeth and 

 fragmentary specimens which have been referred to: M. 

 obscurus, mirificus, and other Eastern species, and also the 

 South American M. andium. None of these species are 

 true mastodon; they are related to the more primitive Trilo- 

 phodon, Tetralophodon, and Stegomastodon (or Dihelodon) of 

 the Miocene and Pliocene. 



Not long since the skull of a mastodon, with eight-foot 

 tusks still intact, was washed up on the Pacific Coast a little 

 south of Santa Barbara, California. 



*Communicated by Mr. Arthur Hutchinson. 



