EVOLUTION OF ELEPHANTS 359
In
connection with the catastrophe which seems to have overtaken the
luckless animals whose fossil remains have been dug out of the asphalt
beds at Rancho La Brea, it is not uninteresting to learn from a
Californian who lived many years ago on a ranch directly opposite La
Brea, that cattle and even squirrels sometimes came to grief on his
ranch, being swallowed up by the earth in a similar way, especially in
wet weather. So swampy was the soil that no bottom could be touched
when a long pole was driven down through it. Although he states that
there was no asphaltum on his ranch, still his experience illustrates
the possibility of animals sinking to their death in traversing a
treacherous soil along, or in the immediate neighbourhood, of the great
fault running through this region.*
A
tract of 32 acres, covering these fossil beds, has recently been
donated to Los Angeles County, by Mr. Hancock, for park purposes. The
more or less restored pits will thus have beautiful surroundings and
will become a point of pilgrimage for scientists.
The
La Brea mastodon and mammoth are undoubtedly Pleistocene, but the
numerous fragmentary remains found in the gold-bearing gravels and
elsewhere in California are many of them older, Pliocene or perhaps
Miocene. To these older species probably belong the various teeth and
fragmentary specimens which have been referred to: M. obscurus, mirificus, and other Eastern species, and also the South American M. andium. None of these species are true mastodon; they are related to the more primitive Trilo-phodon, Tetralophodon, and Stegomastodon (or Dibelodon) of the Miocene and Pliocene.
Not
long since the skull of a mastodon, with eight-foot tusks still intact,
was washed up on the Pacific Coast a little south of Santa Barbara,
California.
'Communicated by Mr. Arthur Hutchinson.
