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Show ; WHALES AND LIONS. As every one knows, or ought to know, the whale Is not a flsh, but mammal, mam-mal, and zoologists have long pondered and disputed about its family tree. In Eocene times the ancestors of mammals mam-mals were beginning to take shape somewhat like those of today and to lose the grotesqueness Inherited from their reptilian progenitors. To be sure, animals were very different from those of today. Horses were no larger than dogs and had five toes, while cattlelike cattle-like tlnorceras, twice the size of an ox, with six horns, tusk-like teeth and five toes, cropped the heritage of Wyoming. Along with these peculiar plant feeders there dwelt some very primitive flesh eaters, to which Prof. Cape gave the name of Creadonta. The scene shifts to modern times. Prof. Fraas of Stuttgart, Germany, is delving in the rocks near Cairo, Egypt. He is getting out huge Jaw bones that have been petrified. The Jaw bones are those of whales, and the rocks near Cairo were. In Eocene times, the seashore. sea-shore. The professor has studied his whale Jaws and compared their teeth with other fossil teeth. Now he tells us in a recent "Abhandlungen" that these teeth of ancient whales are like those of the ancient carnivorous creo-donta. creo-donta. From this he argues that In Eocene, or earlier times, some primitive I flepheater took to an aquatic life. From these old times to the present whales have been -becoming more fishlike. It is hard to believe that the ravenous Hon and Inoffensive and toothless whale of today had a common ancestor, but yet they both have the same tastes for blood, only the whale swallows his food whole. Philadelphia Record. |