Antlers of the Irish Deer
from Nehring

Ten sketch hy
T.PR0. Menzies.

numbers. Their small feet, and huge antlers, added to the great weight of their
bodies, caused them to become mired in the soft lake bottoms, from which they could
not extricate themselves. The significant fact that it is in the underlying marls only
of these former lake-bottoms that their remains are found, points to a very distant
time, since these lakes have long since dried up, and bogs of moss and peat now replace
the former waters. All this, however, is but a theory based on circumstantial evidence.

There is considerable evidence that they continued to exist until the age of early
man, however, and the Encyclopaedia Americana states the belief that it “probably
Owes its extinction to extermination by prehistoric man.”

Whatever may be the real truth regarding their extinction, it is certain that all
fossils connected with its life are of an immense age, and that we have in the
Vancouver Museum a pair of well preserved antlers of that far distant age, is a
source of pride and pleasure.

@ BY ROBERT BLAKELEY GREEN

Camels in The Cariboo

ENTION of the introduction of camels into the Americas is made in 1590 by
M Jose d’Acosta, a Spanish author and Jesuit Missionary to Peru, and reéords

show that de Reinega imported camels into South America during the sixteenth
century. It is probable, therefore, that the Spanish conquistadors, who are generally
credited with bringing the first modern horses to the New World, were also responsible
for the reintroduction of the camel. It is known, too, that the English used camels
in Jamaica and Virginia as early as 1701.

Paleontologists today have almost as much evidence on the evolution of the camel
as they have on that of the horse, and the record is even more remarkable. Modern
horses evolved from a small animal of the approximate dimensions of a Fox-terrier:
the camel, considerably larger and more highly specialized, developed from a creature
somewhat smaller than a Cottontail rabbit. Fossils indicate that a prehistoric species
of camel once lived in the Western Hemisphere, and fossilized remains of camels have

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