“Uncle George!” he cried, “can you come here a minute?”
The ring in his voice suggested a discovery, and the professor hurried over. In the evening light he cast a look at the protruding skull and leaped down in the pit to make sure. Then, suddenly, he cried:
“It is a Moeritherium! By the powers, Perry, you’re the luck boy of this expedition!”
CHAPTER VIII
THE VALLEY OF FOSSIL WHALES
Triumph beamed from every corner of the boy’s face at dinner that evening, as the professor, usually so subdued, fairly gloated with delight over the finding of the Moeritherium skull. Together with the paleo-mastodon skull, discovered only the day before by Antoine, the principal object of the expedition was secured.
“I couldn’t tell exactly what beast it was,” said Perry, in the course of the conversation, “because I couldn’t see that the skull looked anything at all like an elephant’s.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t,” his uncle agreed.
“I couldn’t see how it was an ancestor, then. I don’t quite see, even yet. An elephant has tusks and a trunk. This little Moeritherium hasn’t either, so far as I can make out.”
“That’s because the animal is so far back in the line of development,” the scientist reminded him. “He isn’t in a direct line, but more like a first cousin of what the ancestral elephant must have been, although we haven’t found any specimens of him yet. As for the trunk—well, it’s true there isn’t any sign of that, the eyes are too far forward. But the tusk question is interesting. Do you know, Perry, which are the teeth that the elephant has developed into tusks?”
The boy thought for a moment.