Revision of the Miocene and Pliocene Equidae of North America

Revision of the Miocene and Pliocene Equidae of North America
Author: James Williams Gidley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 78
Release: 1907
Genre: Equidae
ISBN:

"In the foregoing revision the lines of comparison and study have been confined principally to characters of the teeth and skull, for the reason that by far the greater number of species of horses have been founded on tooth and skull material not associated with other parts of the skeleton. The expeditions of the last few years however are constantly increasing the collections and adding quantities of more complete material, including many specimens in which teeth and bones of the feet are associated. This class of material will greatly aid in working out more fully than has been done the characters of foot development of horses, and should result in throwing added light on the phyletic relations of the extremely varied groups which seem to have reached their culmination, as regards numbers of genera and species, in the Miocene period. The principal results attained by this study are, first, a better understanding and interpretation of the principal characters shown in the numerous and varied types representing the American Miocene horses; second, the reestablishment and better definition of several of the genera and species proposed by Leidy, the validity of which was questioned by Cope; and third, a reclassification of the entire family of the Equiidae. As at present understood, the fact seems to be fairly well established that there is a considerable phyletic hiatus between the groups of the Equidae as above subdivided, which are as yet not bridged over by intermediate forms. Such a hiatus seems especially marked between the Anchitheriinae and the Protohippinae, while these groups greatly overlap each other in time. So far as indicated by any known species the Anchitheriinae could not well have stood in direct ancestral line to the latter group or to the Equiinae. There seems also to be almost as decided a gap between the Anchitheriinae and the known species of the older group, the Hyracotheriinae. The Equiinae may well have been derived from some species of the Protohippus division of the Protohippinae"--Page 933-934

Bulletin

Bulletin
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1178
Release: 1923
Genre: Geology
ISBN:

The Age of Mammals

The Age of Mammals
Author: Chris Manias
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2023-06-27
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822989948

When people today hear “paleontology,” they immediately think of dinosaurs. But for much of the history of the discipline, dramatic demonstrations of the history of life focused on the developmental history of mammals. The Age of Mammals examines how nineteenth-century scholars, writers, artists, and public audiences understood the animals they regarded as being at the summit of life. For them, mammals were crucial for understanding the formation (and possibly the future) of the natural world. Yet, as Chris Manias reveals, this combined with more troubling notions: that seemingly promising creatures had been swept aside in the “struggle for life,” or that modern biodiversity was impoverished compared to previous eras. Why some prehistoric creatures, such as the saber-toothed cat and ground sloth, had become extinct, while others seemed to have been the ancestors of familiar animals like elephants and horses, was a question loaded with cultural assumptions, ambiguity, and trepidation. How humans related to deep developmental processes, and whether “the Age of Man” was qualitatively different from the Age of Mammals, led to reflections on humanity’s place within the natural world. With this book, Manias considers the cultural resonance of mammal paleontology from an international perspective—how reconstructions of the deep past of fossil mammals across the world conditioned new understandings of nature and the current environment.