PREHISTORIC SKULL

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 423, 6 January 1933, Page 6

PREHISTORIC SKULL

BONES OF CAT-LIKE ANIMAL DISOOVERSD HALF-MILE BELOW GROUND BFLIEYED PRICELESS A tiny skull brought up from an oil well nearly half a mile below the surface of the earth in Louisiana is believed by Smithsonian Institution officials to be almost priceless beeause of the new light it sheds on the distant past. The skull, now in the National Museum, has been identified as a new species by Dr. George Gaylord Simpson, one of the foremost Ame.rican authorities on ancient mammals. II is believed to have belonged to a warm-blooded insect-eating creature that lived approximately 50,000,000 years ago just at the close of the age of the great dinosaurs, when the mammals were starting on the road to mastery of the earth. There is no creature alive to-day, Sttiithsonian officials say, which can even remotely resemble the anima; that can be recons'fructed from the few- bones brought up by an oil-we.ll drill from the depth of 2460 feet in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. The creature to whom they belonged is believed' to have been about the size of a house cat. The structure of the teeth enable the paleontologists to reconstruct something of the creature's habits. Presumahly it was a dweller in 'thegreat swamps, the drying > up of which brought an end to the wallow-. ing dinosaurs, while the smaller creatures, which had become accustomed

fcrees, found the climatic change beneficial. Qrdinarily, the Smithsonian Institufon points out, the earlier mammals were so small, and their bones