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       # 2025-11-15 - Extinct Animals by Edwin Ray Lankester
       
 (IMG) Book cover image
       
       I added this book to my to-read list over a decade ago.  It seems
       somehow appropriate to read it now shortly after finishing a quick
       programming project with fossil SCM.  I enjoyed the academic tone
       of the book.  It was soothing and at the same time entertaining,
       because is was originally written to pique the interest of kids.
       
       It was interesting to read about the professional opinion of
       educators in England in in 1903 that children should not learn about
       dinosaurs and fossils.  The reasoning was that those are advanced
       topics to learn in higher education, and that kids should learn about
       living animals instead.  This strikes me as a command and control
       style of education.  My cynical side wonders whether dinosaurs were
       inconvenient for theologians, and thus banished to the universities.
       
       I also took an interest in historic changes mentioned in this book.
       For example, Spanish explorers carving a message in rocks on the
       South American shore in the 1600's, and those carvings being over
       150 feet above the ocean by 1903 because of continental lift.  Or
       Julius Caesar mentioning European megafauna that were not extinct
       yet.  Or large lakes that existed in northern Africa during the time
       of the Roman empire that have practically disappeared by now.
       
       It was interesting to read about archaeological evidence that
       indigenous people in South America raised sloths in captivity for
       meat.  They caged them in caves and fed them hay.  This is tongue
       in cheek, but i am imagining sloth tacos.
       
       It was fun to read this book written when the field was new, and the
       subject had not been reduced to Disney accounts of dinosaurs and
       mass extinction events.
       
       What follows are interesting quotes from the book.
       
       * * *
       
       This volume is a corrected shorthand report of the course of lectures
       adapted to a juvenile audience given by me during the Christmas
       holidays 1903 through 1904 at the Royal Institution, London.
       
       I trust that this volume will not be regarded as anything more
       ambitious than an attempt to excite in young people an interest in a
       most fascinating study, and that it will be understood that it does
       not profess to give more than a peep at the strange and wonderful
       history of extinct animals.
       
       The whole art of education consists in exciting the desire to know.
       By showing something wonderful, mysterious, astonishing and
       marvellous, dug from the earth beneath our feet we may awaken the
       desire to understand and learn more about that thing.
       
       The upper specimen is the skull and lower jaw of a rhinoceros, dug up
       last year in the City of London in Whitefriars, under the office of
       the well-known newspaper the Daily Chronicle. Digging in the mud and
       clay there, the workmen came upon this rhinoceros skull. Many such
       have been found in English river gravels, and we know accordingly
       that such animals used to exist on the banks of the Thames many
       thousands of years ago.
       
       A question of great interest is--"What makes animals become extinct?"
       It is obvious in many cases that another animal, [homo sapiens],
       interferes. [We] either kill and eat animals, or take their food from
       them, or occupy their ground, or cut down the forests in which they
       live, and so on. But before [homo sapiens] appeared on the scene
       there were changes going on, and different kinds of animals succeeded
       one another. We know this by finding the remains of different animals
       at different depths in the crust of the earth, in the different
       strata which have succeeded one another. The cause of these changes,
       the cause of the extinction of animals, is a very elaborate and
       difficult question, and one which I do not propose to deal with at
       any length. It is connected, of course, with the whole doctrine of
       the origin of the different kinds of animals.
       
       The whole surface of the earth has been shifting and changing all
       through time. During the millions and millions of years of past ages,
       different seas have arisen, different continents, different dry land
       and different animals,--changed by the various influences of the land
       and climate.
       
       The "crust" of the earth is a mere skin. If we bored twenty miles
       into it we should come to immensely hot molten material, and on this
       the crust is supported. It cannot be said to "rest" on the deeper
       matter, for it is always, though very, very slowly, shifting and
       crumpling.
       
       All mammals' skulls are provided with this pair of knobs or
       "condyles." But in the crocodile's skull you will see below the
       aperture for the spinal cord only one large condyle (marked Bas).
       From such a fragment of the skull then you can at once tell whether
       to place the creature to which it belonged among the hairy
       warm-blooded quadrupeds called mammals, or with the reptiles. A bird
       is like a reptile in having a single joint or knob at the back of the
       skull.
       
       No other animals except the mammals are known to possess a spiral
       internal ear [cochlea], and all known mammals do possess it. If,
       therefore, you discovered a fragment of bone showing this spiral-like
       space you would know that the bit of bone must in all probability
       belong to a mammal.
       
       ...in a visit to the Great Western Desert, the rainless, sandy waste
       lying west of the Nile, not very far from what is now called the
       Fayum, and where in Roman days was the great Lake Meris--now dried up
       to a mere brine-pool, in the salt water of which the freshwater
       fishes of the Nile still live.
       
 (TXT) Lake Moeris
       
       We can get castings from the interior of the skulls and compare them
       with those of recent rhinoceros, hippopotamus and horse, and it is
       found that although Dinoceras and Titanotherium were bigger than the
       largest rhinoceros of to-day, yet they had quite small brains, not
       more than an eighth the volume of that of the recent big animals.
       
       South America was not so long ago a vast island and connected at an
       earlier period with Australia. Later it has joined on to North
       America. Its own peculiar productions in the way of animals appear to
       be the members of the group of mammals called Edentata--very peculiar
       forms, with strange teeth, and none at all in the front of the jaws.
       
       author: Lankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir, 1847-1929
 (TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Ray_Lankester
       LOC:    QE763 .L28
 (HTM) source: https://archive.org/details/extinctanimals1905lank
       tags:   ebook,history,non-fiction,outdoor
       title:  Extinct Animals
       
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 (DIR) ebook
 (DIR) history
 (DIR) non-fiction
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