210 LAND MAMMALS IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE 



fined to the extreme north of the continent, the Arctic islands 

 and Greenland. The remains of Musk-Oxen have been found 

 mostly along the great terminal moraine which marks the 

 front of the last ice-invasion, but they occurred also as far 

 south as Oklahoma, and in Utah they ranged far to the south 

 of the ice-front. Nothing could be more conclusive evidence 

 of a chmate much colder than the modern one than the presence 

 of Caribou and Musk-Oxen in the United States and of the 

 Walrus on the coast of Georgia. 



The smaller animals were much as they are now, differing 

 only in range. The fsabre-tooth tigers, the last of a most 

 interesting line, persisted in the south, and an extinct genus of 

 skunks has been discovered in Arkansas, but otherwise the 

 Carnivora were entirely modern in character. Unfortunately, 

 these smaller animals are very incompletely known, much 

 the richest aggregation which has yet been found being 

 that collected by Mr. Brown in the Conard Fissure, Arkansas. 

 From this collection Mr. Brown has described thirty-seven 

 genera and fifty-one species of mammals, of which four genera 

 and twenty-four species are extinct. That is to say, less than 

 one-ninth of the genera and one-half of the species represent 

 extinct forms. Contrast this with the middle Pleistocene 

 assemblage found in the Port Kennedy cavern in eastern Penn- 

 sylvania, of sixty-four species with at least forty extinct ones. 



The foregoing sketch, brief and imperfect as it necessarily 

 is, makes it sufficiently plain that North America during the 

 Pleistocene was far richer in mammalian life than it was when 

 the continent was first settled by Europeans. When we make 

 the proper allowance for the many forms which undoubtedly 

 remain to be discovered and for those which may have vanished 

 without leaving a trace behind them, the. contrast becomes 

 all the more striking. Not only did Pleistocene North America 

 have substantially all the mammals that it now possesses, but 

 it had many more. The lions and fsabre-tooth tigers, the 

 gigantic fshort-faced bears, the tapirs and many varieties of 



