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 [1]--now dried up to a mere brine-pool, in the salt water of which the freshwater fishes of the Nile still live.
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
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Ray_Lankester
title: Extinct Animals