The Romance of Modern Geology / Describing in simple but exact language the making of the earth with some account of prehistoric animal life

by Edwin Sharpe Grew

[17] Of the Galapagos Islands.

In Australia, the land of the marsupials or mammals with pouches, the bones of many gigantic creatures belonging to that tribe of animal have been found. Giant kangaroos, twice as tall as the biggest living kangaroo, wombats and voles as big as a rhinoceros, have been discovered. One of these is the Diprotodon, which Sir Richard Owen reconstructed much in the same way that he reconstructed the Moa, and of which Dr. Stirling has since found complete specimens in a morass in South Australia.

Diprotodon

Equal in size to a large rhinoceros. (Remains found in Australia.)

Last of all of the great extinct mammals which we shall mention is the Mammoth, which has a peculiar interest because, like the Mylodon, it certainly survived until man was on the earth, as there are many more evidences to prove.

In one of the caves of France inhabited by prehistoric men and thickly strewn with the chipped flints which they used as tools and weapons, as well as with the bones of extinct animals which they ate, a piece of Mammoth's tusk has been found on which is rudely but cleverly carved, evidently by the men who lived there, the picture of a Mammoth. (There are besides, antlers on which a reindeer is very cleverly and artistically outlined. Even the tuft of hair below the chin is shown, and the great feet and the extra toes are correctly pictured. Clearly the men who drew this reindeer lived with the reindeer; and besides the reindeer, living near these men in the south of France, was the great Mammoth.)

The Mammoth was like an Indian elephant, but with a coarse hairy pelt. It was rather bigger than the big Indian elephant, and its tusks had a different curvature; but we may dispose of the popular idea that it was bigger than any elephant. No Siberian Mammoth has yet been found higher at the shoulders than nine feet six inches, whereas the African elephant stands eleven feet and sometimes more at the shoulders. Among the fossil elephants of Southern Europe and of North America (Elephas imperator) there are two which stood from twelve to thirteen feet high. The remains of the Mammoth are left all over the north of Europe and Asia and of the countries which were subjected to glacial influences. Even in England its teeth and tusks are constantly found, and in the Natural History Museum there is a whole skull with enormous tusks, which was dug up in a brickfield at Ilford. Probably this animal continued to exist longer in Asia and Siberia than in our own part of the world: and the cold and ice preserved their remains so well that whole carcases have been dug up.

One such instance is historic. In 1799 a native chief near Lake Onkoul, in Siberia, while seeking for Mammoth teeth, perceived a great shapeless mass among the ice. He watched it for some years, till at the end of the fifth year the ice melted and disclosed the carcase of a whole Mammoth.

In the month of March, 1804, Schumakhoff cut off the horns (the tusks), which he exchanged with the merchant Bultunof for goods of the value of fifty roubles (not quite eight pounds sterling). It was not till two years after this that Mr. Adams, of the St. Petersburg Academy, who was travelling with Count Golovkin, sent by the Czar of Russia on an embassy to China, having been told at Yakutsk of the discovery of an animal of extraordinary magnitude on the shores of the Frozen Ocean, near the mouth of the River Lena, betook himself to the place. He found the Mammoth still in the same place, but very much mutilated. The Yakuts of the neighbourhood had cut off the flesh, with which they fed their dogs; wild beasts, such as white bears, wolves, wolverenes, and foxes, had also fed upon it, and traces of their footsteps were seen around. The skeleton, almost entirely cleared of its flesh, remained whole, with the exception of one foreleg. The spine of the back, one scapula, the pelvis, and the other three limbs were still held together by the ligaments and by parts of the skin; the other scapula was found not far off. The head was covered with a dry skin; one of the ears was furnished with a tuft of hairs; the balls of the eyes were still distinguishable; the brain still occupied the cranium, but seemed dried up; the point of the lower lip had been gnawed and the upper lip had been destroyed so as to expose the teeth; the neck was furnished with a long flowing mane; the skin, of a dark-grey colour, covered with black hairs and a reddish wool, was so heavy that ten persons found great difficulty in transporting it to the shore.