The World Before the Deluge

by Louis Figuier

“The country watered by the Viloui is mountainous; all the stratification of these mountains is horizontal. The beds consist of selenitic and calcareous schists and beds of clay, mixed with numerous beds of pyrites. On the banks of the Viloui we meet with coal much broken; probably coal-beds exist higher up near to the river. The brook Kemtendoï skirts a mountain entirely formed of selenite or crystallised sulphate of lime and of rock-salt, and this mountain of alabaster is more than 300 versts (about 200 miles), in ascending the Viloui, from the place where the Rhinoceros was found. Opposite to the place we see, near the river, a low hill, about a hundred feet high, which, though sandy, contains some beds of millstone. The body of the Rhinoceros had been buried in coarse gravelly sand near this hill, and the nature of the soil, which is always frozen, had preserved it. The soil near the Viloui never thaws to a great depth, for, although the rays of the sun soften the soil to the depth of two yards in the more elevated sandy places, in the valleys, where the soil is half sand and half clay, it remains frozen at the end of summer half an ell below the surface. Without this intense cold the skin of the animal and many parts of it would long since have perished. The animal could only have been transported from some southern country to the frozen north at the epoch of the Deluge, for the most ancient chronicles speak of no changes of the globe more recent, to which we could attribute the deposit of these remains and of the bones of elephants which are found dispersed all over Siberia.”[92]

In this extract the author refers to a memoir previously published by himself, in the “Commentarii” of the Academy of St. Petersburg. This memoir, written in Latin, and entitled “Upon some Animals of Siberia,” has never been translated. After some general considerations, the author thus relates the circumstances attending the discovery of the fossil Rhinoceros, with some official documents affirming their correctness, and the manner in which the facts were brought under his notice by the Governor of Irkutsk, General Bril: “The skin and tendons of the head and feet still preserved considerable flexibility, imbued as it were with humidity from the earth; but the flesh exhaled a fetid ammoniacal odour, resembling that of a latrine. Compelled to cross the Baïkal Lake before the ice broke up, I could neither draw up a sufficiently careful description nor make sketches of the parts of the animal; but I made them place the remains, without leaving Irkutsk, upon a furnace, with orders that after my departure they should be dried by slow degrees and with the greatest care, continuing the process for some time, because the viscous matter which incessantly oozed out could only be dissipated by great heat. It happened, unfortunately, that during the operation the posterior part of the upper thigh and the foot were burnt in the overheated furnace, and they were thrown away; the head and the extremity of the hind foot only remained intact and undamaged by the process of drying. The odour of the softer parts, which still contained viscous matter in their interior, was changed by the desiccation into one resembling that of flesh decomposed in the sun.

“The Rhinoceros to which the members belonged was neither large for its species nor advanced in age, as the bones of the head attest, yet it was evidently an adult from the comparison made of the size of the cranium as compared with that of others of the same species more aged, which were afterwards found in a fossil state in divers parts of Siberia. The entire length of the head from the upper part of the nape of the neck to the extremity of the denuded bone of the jaw was thirty inches; the horns were not with the head, but we could still see evident vestiges of two horns, the nasal and frontal. The front, unequal and a little protuberant between the orbits, and of a rhomboidal egg-shape, is deficient in the skin, and only covered by a light horny membrane, bristling with straight hairs as hard as horn.

“The skin which covers the greater part of the head is in the dried state, a tenacious, fibrous substance, like curried leather, of a brownish-black on the outside and white in the inside; when burnt, it had the odour of common leather; the mouth, in the place where the lips should have been soft and fleshy, was putrid and much lacerated; the extremities of the maxillary bone were bare. Upon the left side, which had probably been longest exposed to the air, the skin was here and there decomposed and rubbed on the surface; nevertheless, the greater part of the mouth was so well preserved on the right side that the pores, or little holes from which doubtless the hairs had fallen, were still visible all over that side, and even in front. In the right side of the jaw there were still in certain places numerous hairs grouped in tufts, for the most part rubbed down to the roots, and here and there of two or three lines still retaining their full length. They stand erect, are stiff, and of an ashy colour, but with one or two black, and a little stiffer than the others, in each bunch.

“What was most astonishing, however, was the fact that the skin which covered the orbits of the eyes, and formed the eyelids, was so well preserved and so healthy that the openings of the eyelids could be seen, though deformed and scarcely penetrable to the finger; the skin which surrounded the orbits, though desiccated, formed circular furrows. The cavities of the eyes were filled with matter, either argillaceous or animal, such as still occupied a part of the cavity of the cranium. Under the skin the fibres and tendons still remained, and above all the remains of the temporal muscles; finally, in the throat hung some great bundles of muscular fibres. The denuded bones were young and less solid than in other fossil crania of the same species. The bone which gave support to the nasal horn was not yet attached to the vomer; it was unprovided with articulations like the processes of the young bones. The extremities of the jaws preserved no vestige either of teeth or sockets, but they were covered here and there with the remains of the integument. The first molar was distant about four inches from the extreme edge of the jaw.

“The foot which remains to me, and which, if I am not mistaken, belongs to the left hind limb, has not only preserved its skin quite intact and furnished with hairs, or their roots, as well as the tendons and ligaments of the heel in all their strength, but also the skin itself quite whole as far as the bend in the knee. The place of the muscles was filled with black mud. The extremity of the foot is cloven into three angles, the bony parts of which, with the periosteum, still remain here and there; the horny hoofs had been detached. The hairs adhering in many places to the skin were from one to three lines in length, tolerably stiff and ash-coloured. What remains of it proves that the foot was covered with bunches of hair, which hung down.

“We have never, so far as I know, observed so much hair on any rhinoceros which has been brought to Europe in our times, as appears to have been presented by the head and feet we have described. I leave you then to decide if our rhinoceros of the Lena was born or not in the temperate climate of Central Asia. In fact, the rhinoceros, as I gather from the relations of travellers, belongs to the forests of Northern India; and it is likely enough that these animals differ in a more hairy skin from those which live in the burning zones of Africa, just in the same way that other animals of a hotter climate are less warmly covered than those of the same genera in temperate countries.”[93]

Of all fossil ruminants one of the largest and most singular is the Sivatherium, whose remains have been found in the valley of Murkunda, in the Sewalik branch of the Sub-Himalayan Mountains. Its name is taken from that of Siva, the Indian deity worshipped in that part of India.

The Sivatherium giganteum had a body as bulky as that of an ox, and bore a sort of resemblance to the living Elk. It combined in itself the characteristics of different kinds of Herbivores, at the same time that it was marked by individual peculiarities. The massive head possessed four deciduous, hollow horns, like the Prongbuck; two front ones conical, smooth, and rapidly rising to a point, and two hinder ones of larger size, and branched, projected forward above the eyes.[94] Thus it differed from the deer, whose solid horns annually drop off, and from the antelope tribe, sheep and oxen, whose hollow horns are persistent, and resembled only one living ruminant, the prongbuck, in having had hollow horns subject to shedding. [Fig. 176] is a representation of the Sivatherium restored, in so far, at least, as it is possible to do so in the case of an animal of which only the cranium and a few other bones have been discovered.