OCR Text |
Show i Fossils Awe Ocu Indians Panama Find Expected To Push Back History OCU, PANAMA A Smithsonian Institution scientist is coming from Washington, D. C, to this little jungle jun-gle village to examine a find of fossil fos-sil bones that may extend knowledge knowl-edge of central America back a million years. The fossils are the first of their kind to be discovered in Panama or surrounding countries. Up to now, the rank growth of the tropical countries has hidden all traces of what the region was like before mankind appeared on the scene. While the find has attracted international inter-national interest among scientists, it has thrown the Indians of this out of the way community into a superstitious super-stitious silence. They look with awe upon the ribs four feet long and the leg bones 15 times larger than human hu-man ones that have been uncovered. uncov-ered. Some of the bones have been reasonably rea-sonably well identifed as belonging to a toxodon, a beast which long ago disappeared from the world's surface. sur-face. It was about nine feet long and shaped like a rhinoceros. Other bones seem to be those of a giant ground sloth, which grew as much as 20 feet tall! Some of the bones have been completely turned to agate by their hundreds of thousands of years in the earth. They were found about six miles from here, in a spot known as Rin-con Rin-con Santo, which means in Spanish Sacred Corner. Possibly because of odd things that were found there in the forgotten past, the spot has always al-ways been looked upon by the Indians In-dians with reverence. Something in the soil of the land around the Sacred Corner acts upon buried objects to preserve them and turn them to stone. The actual discovery of the bones was made by Joaquin Carrizo, manager of a local hotel which has a unique facade made of petrified wood perhaps per-haps a million years old. He was hunting for additional wood pieces when he came across the bones, some uncovered by erosion ero-sion and some already washed into the bed of a former stream. The cache of fossils apears to b big, but its full extent is unknown. |