Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/116

88 and the ape; the last being here, as in the Meiocene age (Fig. 8), the most highly specialised form.

It is not out of place here to call attention to the history of the development of antlers in the deer. In the lower Meiocenes no member of the family possessed antlers. In the mid Meiocene strata of the age of the Sables de l'Orléanais, Professor Gaudry notes small, erect, branching antlers persistent through life of Procervulus aurelianensis of Thenay. This most remarkable antler, characterised by the absence of a burr or rose, is identical with that figured and described by Professor Leidy from Niobrara, and considered by him intermediate between the antlers of the deer and the horns of the antelopes. It may fairly claim to be the most rudimentary form of antler belonging to a type which is no longer represented. The true starting-point of the antlered deer of the post- Meiocene ages is presented by the simple forked crown of the C. dicroceros of the mid Meiocene (Fig. 8). The cervine antler in the upper Meiocene becomes more complex, but is still small and erect like that of the roe. In the Pleiocene it becomes larger and longer, and altogether more complex and differentiated, some forms, such as the Cervus dicranios (Fig. 16) of Nesti, being the most complicated antlers known either in the living or fossil state. These successive changes are analogous to those which are to be observed in the development of the