Logo
Prev
Bookmark
Rotate
Print
Next
Contents
All Pages
Related Articles
Browse Issues
Help
Search
Home
'
National Geographic : 1961 Oct
Contents
Mammoth Horns Attest the Size of an Extinct Ram Pelorovis, a denizen of Olduvai, carried fantastic horns larger than the tusks of most elephants. Dr. Leakey inspects the fossilized cores, which stretch more than six feet from tip to tip and represent less than half the horn mass dur ing life. Modern ram's skull in background has one horn stripped to the core to suggest the missing sections. Dental picks and paintbrushes help Richard Leakey in the deli cate task of removing fossils. He scrapes rock from the leg bone of a horse. Tusk of an extinct hippo potamus lies in left foreground. Tiny fossils represent remains of a meal for Olduvai's early inhabi tants. Largest bone is a lizard's jaw, others the jaws of shrews. Pencil point gives scale. Central Europe has a larger species, found at a later geological level than that earlier East Africa dinotherium. Because of its great size, the Central European type was named Dinotherium maximus. Maximus held the stage for a while until a still larger dinothe rium was discovered in Germany. Scientists scratched their heads and labeled that one Dinotherium gigantissimus. Its tusks were three feet long. But I'm afraid science has a real problem now, for our new Olduvai dinotherium puts gigantissimus to shame-its tusks alone KODACHROMESBY ROBERTF. SISSON (ABOVE) AND THOMAS NEBBIA C N.G .S . measure five feet on the curve (page 581). What to call such a giant? Perhaps Dr. Matthew W. Stirling, a member of the Na tional Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration, has the answer. He suggests mirabilis, Latin for "marvelous." "Mirabilis" turned up in the lowest level of Bed II, where it had apparently died in a swamp and where Chellean man seems to have found it and cut up the carcass with his stone tools (painting, pages 582-3). The tools lay scattered right in with the skeleton. One of the remarkable features of this weird creature was the immense strength he must have possessed. We all know that when we chew, it is the lower jaw that moves up and down, while the upper remains fixed. The same is true of elephants, whose tusks grow out of the upper jaw and are therefore a fairly stationary burden. Not so the dinotherium. His five-foot tusks were imbedded in the lower jaw, and the muscular power required to chew with that massive burden must have been staggering. When it came to excavating and preserving the bones of our new-found giant, we were advised by Dr. J. Desmond Clark, Curator of the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum in Northern Rhodesia, to get a new type of chemical pre servative called Bedacryl. 585
Links
Archive
1961 Nov
1961 Sep
Navigation
Previous Page
Next Page