“Right,” the professor answered. “And about how long ago?”
“Two million years, according to that scale you gave me on shipboard.”
“Well, about two million years ago, there were four different families of camelids in America which were destined to develop. The earliest of them seems to have been a small creature called Protylopus, about a foot high.”
“Weren’t there any of them in Africa or Asia?”
“None have been found. No, so far as we know, the camel family is pure American. All through the Eocene they remained quite tiny creatures, no bigger than a cat. They grew a little larger during the next period, the Oligocene, becoming about the size of a sheep-dog, but of course they were much more slenderly built. It was in the age after that, however, Perry, that the ancestors of the camels spread all over America. During the first part of the Miocene, vast herds of long-necked camels, known as Alticamelus, or the giraffe-camel, roamed over the western plains, and their bones are found by thousands in the Miocene deposits of Colorado.”
“Why giraffe-camels, Uncle George?” asked Perry. “A camel hasn’t anything to do with a giraffe, has it?”
“Not a thing,” was the reply, “although the giraffe’s scientific name, Camelopardalis, seems to give color to the idea. No, Perry, in certain ways a giraffe is an intermediate between a deer and an antelope. Don’t forget that a giraffe always has horns, although they are only small bony growths which correspond to the bony core of a deer’s horns, and the giraffe’s male ancestors had long horns, as in deer. But the giraffe-camel of the American Miocene was just plain camel, or rather, he was on the road to cameldom. He was called a giraffe-camel because he had a long thin neck like a giraffe. He carried it straight, too, so far as we can determine, not in that bended loop effect of the modern camel.”
“What happened to them?”
“One branch turned into the llamas, which are now the beasts of burden in the Andes, and which were used by the Incas of Peru for the same purposes that we use horses. The llamas used to be in Colorado, too, and we have found their bones, fossilized. The other branch of the camelids crossed by the Behring Sea bridge, and developed into the modern camel in Asia, naturally reaching Africa in the latter part of that period before the coming of the European Ice Age.”
“But what happened to our American giraffe-camels?”