een in Tooth 

 and Clow 



by Margery C. Coombs, 



In the early 1 800s, the French anatomist 

 Baron Georges Cuvier noted that claws 

 are usually associated with sharp teeth and 

 carnivorous habits, while hoofs are associ- 

 ated with grinding teeth and a plant diet. 



Using this rule, he could reconstruct much 

 of the morphology of an animal from a 

 small part of the skeleton. A few excep- 

 tions to this generalization have existed: 

 clawed animals such as extinct ground 



sloths and sauropod dinosaurs, which de- 

 spite their simply shaped teeth are thought 

 to have been herbivores. (Only one large 

 clawed herbivore exists today, the endan- 

 gered giant panda.) Another successful 

 group of large clawed plant-eaters, the 

 chalicotheres, appeared first in the 

 Eocene, about forty-five million years 

 ago, in Eurasia and North America. The 

 last of their Une lingered in Africa and 

 Asia until the early Pleistocene. 



Because of their oddity, chalicotheres 

 posed some problems for paleontologists. 

 In the 1820s through the 1840s, chali- 

 cothere claws from some European quar- 

 ries were attributed to a "gigantic pan- 

 golin" or "colossal edentate," perhaps a 



70 Natural History 4/94 



