Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 November 1891 — The Ancient Rhinoceros. [ARTICLE]

The Ancient Rhinoceros.

It is very interesting to look at the pictures of the world in the long past ages that geology presents to our imagination. We see that there was a time when even the polar regions must have bloomed with many of the splendid and varied forms of life that now adorn the tropics. The fossil remains of these ancient forms preserved in the bosom of the rocks carry us back perhaps millions of years in the earth’s history, ana show clearly what wonderful revolutions the surface of the globe has undergone since the first plants and the first animals appeared upon it. Who would think of meeting a rhinoceros nowadayson the prairies of northwestern Canada, unless, perchance, a traveling menagerie should pass that way? Yet at one time, as recent discoveries prove, a creature closely resembling the rhinoceros of India and Africa dwelt in that now comparatively cold, snowy and barren region. Remains of these extinct ancestors of an animal that in our day thrives only in the tangled tropical forests and under the hot equatorial sun have been found buried in the Canadian rocks, where now the cold blasts of winter blow over treeless plains and sweep the flanks of ice-incrusted mountains. The rhinoceros of that remote age was no less formidable a beast than his decendants, for the skull of one of the skeletons discovered is three feet long, while some of its teeth are four inches across. The fossil remains of many other forms of animals have lately been found there, including extinct species of the horse, the deer and the turtle. In some far-away time perpetual summer must have reigned in regions where ice and snow now prevail for a large part of the year, or else animals that to-day love only the sun must have been inured to a more rigorous climate. Geology has evidently only just begun to unfold the wonderful story of the world’s history.