THE HORNS AND ANTLERS OP RUMINANTS 251 



highly specialised : true Antelopes with horns lyrate (Gazella), 

 recurved (Palceoryx), or spirally twisted (Palceoreas) ; true stags 

 with branched and spreading antlers ; and, at the close of the 

 period, true oxen with long horns laterally projected and curved 

 anteriorly. Similar types recur in the Pleistocene and recent 

 formations, but with further differentiation of horn-bearing 

 genera (sheep and goats), and further specialisation towards 

 increased complexity and greatly increased proportions. We 

 find, on the other hand, that the altered numerical proportion 

 between the armed and unarmed ungulates becomes a striking 

 feature of each succeeding fauna. In the older Pliocene, repre- 

 sented by the famous Pikermi fossils, horse-like animals (Hip- 

 pariori) are numerous, but armed ruminants (Giraffe and Antelope) 

 already hold their own; while in the later Pliocene* of the Cromer 

 Forest bed, artiodactyles, — including long-horned oxen, complex- 

 anthered deer, and tusked pigs, — largely predominate, gradually 

 (Pleistocene and Palaeolithic) crowding the unarmed perisso- 

 dactyles out of the historical perspective. Of the genera Bos 

 and Cervus it may be said with truth that " there were giants in 

 the earth in those days," armed with cranial weapons of more 

 than proportionately gigantic size : buffaloes with long crescentic 

 horns measuring a dozen feet along the curves from tip to tip 

 (Bos antiquus) ; and huge elaphine stags, — some with round 

 antlers (Cervus Spelceus) resembling, yet exceeding, those of the 

 Wapiti, and some with palmed antlers (Cervus giganteus) of a 

 weight and span that dwarf all existing types. These, and other 

 species, associated with great carnivora that preyed upon them, 

 are numerously represented in the river-gravels of Pleistocene 

 Eurasia, and were contemporary with palaeolithic man, who 

 finally intervened to exterminate both the destroyers and the 

 destroyed. 



Thus it appears that, from the early Tertiaries (Eocene) and 

 onwards, carnivores of destructive type have lived by incessant 

 slaughter of ungulates ; that, in the middle Tertiaries (Miocene), 

 ancestral ruminants developed frontal weapons contemporaneously 



* Prof. Boyd Dawkins assigns the Forest-bed series to " the Pleistocene, 

 or that period when the living higher Mammalia were abundant, and not to 

 the Pleiocene, in which there were only some three or four of the higher 

 Mammalia present in Europe." I have followed Prof. Martin Duncan in he 

 text, but the disputed point does not affect my argument. 



