TYPES OF ANIMALS SURVIVING IN CENTRAL EUROPE FROM THE DRIFT PERIOD
Many of the animal forms that were very frequent in the Drift Period appear now in Central Europe only as Alpine dwellers, living on the borders of eternal snow. Such are the ibex, chamois, marmot, and Alpine hare.
Breaking up of the Earth
It was this second deterioration of the climate, with the fresh advances made by the glaciers and masses of inland ice, which definitely did away with the older Drift fauna that was not equal to the sudden climatic change. Nor did the woolly-haired rhinoceros, the Rhinoceros merckii, and the cave-bear survive the climax of the new Glacial Period. Even the woolly-haired mammoth succumbed. It and the woolly-haired rhinoceros, accompanied by the musk-ox and bison, had made their way into the Far North of Asia. But while the two last species bore the inclemencies of the climate, the rhinoceroses and elephants met their end here. And yet they had long preserved their lives on the borders of eternal ice. Whole carcases, both of the woolly-haired and Merckian rhinoceroses, and also of the woolly-haired mammoth, the bison, and the musk-ox, with skin and hair and well-preserved soft parts, have been discovered in the ice and frozen ground between the Yenisei and Lena, and on the New Siberian Islands at the mouth of the Lena. The carcases of the mammoth and rhinoceros found imbedded in the ice were covered with a coat of thick woolly hair and reddish-brown bristles ten inches long; about thirty pounds of hair from such a mammoth were placed in the St. Petersburg Natural History Museum. A mane hung from the animal’s neck almost to its knees, and on its head was soft hair a yard long. The animals were therefore in this respect well equipped for enduring a cold climate. As regards their food they were also adapted to a cold climate, traces of coniferæ and willows—that is, “Northern plants”—having been found in the hollows of the molar teeth of mammoths and rhinoceroses. The mammoth proves to have had greater resisting power, and to have been more fit for further migrations, than the rhinoceros. The latter’s range of distribution extended over the whole of Northern and Temperate Europe, China and Central Asia, and Northern Asia and Siberia. But, as we have seen, the mammoth penetrated not only into North Africa, but, what is of the highest importance for the proper understanding of the settling of the New World, even into North America.
Companions of the Mammoth
The connection which in earlier geological periods had united Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America in the greatest homogeneous zoogeographical kingdom, the Arctogæa, was broken during the Tertiary and Drift Periods, so that several zoogeographical provinces were formed. The connection with North America was the first to be broken, so that even in the last two divisions of the Tertiary Period, the Miocene and Pliocene Epochs, the Old and the New Worlds stood in the relation of independent zoogeographical provinces to one another. Now, it is of the greatest importance to note that during the Drift Period North America again received some Northern immigrants from the Old World, according to Von Zittel “probably viâ Eastern Asia.” Consequently, during the Drift Period communication existed, at least temporarily, between Asia and North America in the region of Bering Strait, sufficient to allow the mammoth and some companions to migrate from the one continent to the other. In Kotzebue Sound mammoth remains are found in the “ground-ice formation,” together with those of the horse, elk, reindeer, musk-ox and bison. Mammoth remains are also known to have been found in the Bering Islands, St. George in the Pribylov group, and Unalaska, one of the Aleutian Islands. In that period the mammoth arrived in the New World as a colonist driven from the Old. It spread widely over British North America, Alaska, and Canada; it has also been found in Kentucky. A relatively recent union of the circumpolar regions of the Northern Hemisphere—of Europe, Asia, and North America—is also proved by the occurrence of animals that we recognise as companions of the mammoth, but which, surviving the Glacial Period, are still distributed over the whole region, such as the reindeer, elk, and bison. The absence in Asia of several animals specially characteristic of the European Drift (the hippopotamus, ibex, chamois, fallow-dear, wildcat, and cave-bear) explains also their absence in the North American Drift fauna. It is particularly strange that the cave-bear did not reach Northern Asia. It is otherwise the most frequent beast of prey of the Drift Period, and hundreds of its carcases often lie buried in the caves and clefts it once inhabited. In Southern Russia numerous remains of it are found, whereas in the English caves it is rarer, the cave-hyena predominating here. Apart from the exceptions just mentioned, J. F. Brandt considers North Asia and the high Northern latitudes to be the region in which the European, North Asiatic, and North American land fauna had concentrated during the Tertiary and Drift Periods, and whence their migrations and advances took place according as it grew older. As the northern fauna spread over more southern latitudes during the Drift Period, they took possession of the habitats of the species there belonging to the Tertiary Period, drove them back into tropical and subtropical regions, and formed the real stock of the Drift fauna, as described by Von Zittel in his “Palæozoology.”
AN ACTUAL PHOTOGRAPH OF THE PREHISTORIC MAMMOTH
This stuffed carcase of a mammoth is the rarest treasure of St. Petersburg Academy. Skeletons of these creatures exist in plenty, but actual carcases are very rare. This was found embedded in the ice on the New Siberian Islands. One carcase so embedded was discovered five years before it could be freed from the ice.