ASIATIC LINK WITH AMERICA

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 48, 20 November 1926, Page 24

ASIATIC LINK WITH AMERICA

IMPORTANT FINDS Millions of years ago, in the days when dinosaurs wallowed in the swamps and laid their eggs on the shore sands and mud, America and Asia were joined, and a great i-nbroken forest stretched from Manchuria to Maine. This is indicated, according to Dr. Ralph W. Chaney, of the Carnegie Institution, not only by the close resemblances of tho trees and other plants ol Eastern Asia and Eastern America today, but by the resemblances of the plant fossils found in Asia to those of the same geological periods found in many parts of America. Dr. Chaney, we are told in the Science Service’s “Daily Science News Bulletin (Washington), was sent by the Carnegie Institution to accompany the Third Asiatic Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History, and bis especial field of investigation was the fossil plant remains found in the same sands with the dinosaur eggs and with the flint implements of the early human inhabitants. The trees growing in Mongolia during the cretaceous period, when the dinosaurs were laying their eggs in the sand, have a general resemblance to those whose fossils form the petrified forest of Arizona, states Dr. Chaney. they belonged largely to the group known as the Araucarians, now represented by the Norfolk Island pine and other ielated trees found in the Southern Hemisphere. Later, in the territory period, only about four or five million years ago. the forest which covered parts of Manchuria much resembled the fossil of California and Oregon, according to the records of tho rocks in both places. Both of these fossil floras have much in common with the present-day forest of the Pacific Coast redwood belt. Thev were dominated by a species of sequoia closely similar to, if not. identical* with the nodern coast redwood, but also contained secondary elements, such as alder, tanoak, maple and bay. Dr. Chaney concludes from the evidence now in band that during all of this immensely long period Asia and North America as well have been slowly becoming drier. . The redwood tree serves as an indicator plant. It requires tin annual rainfall of at least forty inches, and freedom from any long season of permanent frost. Its former presence in Manchuria, which now lias a rainfall of only about twenty-five inches, and its present confinement to a comparatively narrow strin of mountain country on the American Pacificslope, are arguments in support of his thesis. , . , Similarly, during the same peri n (L Mongolia.' to the north of Manchuria and farther inland, supported a tree population indicating a semi-arid condition; mostlv conifers and poplars, with bells of rushes about the occasional pools. But Mongolia is now one of the world’s greatest deserts; again an indication of the progressive drying up of tho continent.