American Museum of Natural History 



France 



IP Cruising through Provence 



June 23 - July 3, 1994 



The Rhone River wends 

 its way through Provence, 

 one of France's most pic- 

 turesque regions. Lov- 

 ingly captured on canvas 

 by Van Gogh, Gauguin, 

 Cezanne and others, it is a 

 beguiling region that 

 blends history, culture 

 and natural beauty to per- 

 fection. 



A team of Museum ex- 

 perts accompany us as we cruise up the Rhone aboard the 5-star m.s. 

 Cezanne from Martigue to Viviers. We will discover the splendor of 

 ancient Rome as exemplified by the ruins in Aries, Viviers, Nimes and 

 St. Remy's environs. Cities and towns rife with medieval remnants, such 

 St. Gilles, Aigues-Mortes, Avignon, Les Baux-de-Provence and Aix-en- 



Provence, add to the his- 

 toric atmosphere of our itin- 

 erary. Not to be forgotten, 

 we will also enjoy the sub- 

 lime beauty of the country- 

 side, including the magnifi- 

 cent Luberon range and the 

 isolated marshes and sand 

 dunes of the Camargue. Join 

 us for this special jour- 

 ney through southern 

 France. 



American 

 Museum of 

 Natural 

 History 



Discovery Cruises 



Central Park West at 79th St. 



New York, NY 10024-5192 



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density of prey decreases, perhaps because 

 of environmental changes, the home range 

 of such a predator has to increase to insure 

 enough food for survival. 



Sabertooths faced with a scenario of de- 

 clining prey and, thus, increasing home- 

 range size would also be less and less 

 likely to encounter potential mates. Even- 

 tually, the chances of a sabertooth finding 

 a mate in a neighboring territory would 

 become remote, and the population would 

 decline, with extinction inevitable unless 

 environmental circumstances improved 

 and prey increased. Lending some support 

 to this idea is evidence that some of the 

 North American sabertooth extinctions 

 overlap with turnovers and extinctions in 

 the ungulate faunas, particularly in the late 

 Miocene. The megafaunal extinctions of 

 large herbivores that took place at the end 

 of the Pleistocene may have sounded the 

 death knell for the saber-toothed eco- 

 morph worldwide. 



Will there ever be another saber- 

 toothed ecomorph? We cannot know, of 

 course. But one candidate for a saber- 

 toothed ancestor might be the Asian 

 clouded leopard, Neofelis nebulosa, a for- 

 est-living, jaguar-sized cat with the 

 longest canines of any extant felid. 



Some mammalian traits appear to have 

 evolved only once, with no evidence of 

 convergence over time or space. For ex- 

 ample, although a variety of famiUes con- 

 tain gliding mammals, all true flying 

 mammals — bats — belong to a single 

 order, the Chiroptera. (The only other ver- 

 tebrates to have evolved powered flight are 

 birds and the extinct pterosaurs.) 



Our own mode of bipedalism, with an 

 upright torso and a striding gait, is also 

 unique. Many mammals (such as kanga- 

 roos and many types of rodents) have a 

 hopping mode of bipedal locomotion in 



Pogonodon platycopis (once 

 regarded as being in the genus 

 Dinictisj was one of the nim- 

 ravids, an extinct family of 

 carnivorous mammals only 

 distantly related to true cats. 

 Pogonodon had scimitarlike 

 canines shorter than those of 

 Smilodon; it was also smaller 

 and more lightly built and— as 

 this artist's rendition sug- 

 gests — may have had body 

 markings like an ocelot (far 

 right, bottom). 



Illustration by Pat Ortega 



82 Natural History 4/94 



