The Vanished Animals of East Africa



UPDATED, with full pages from book.

As a child, one of the most engrossing books I ever happened upon was this national geographic book at the South Bend library, called Animals of east Africa, by Louis Leakey, who is famous for digging up remains of our own half-ape ancestors. I was astonished to find a chapter of the book entitled "The Vanished" which was devoted to prehistoric African fauna, other than australopithicines. 

There, before me, was a painting of two AFRICAN TIGERS having brought own an eland. 

Now as everyone knows these days, an African tiger is a contradiction in terms. When I showed my dad, he was astonished too, and said, "Read it. You might learn something."

This painting, and others in this chapter, were by famed palaeoartist Jay Matternes. I recognized his work as being by the same artist I'd encountered in many other prehistoric books, although, back then, I didn't know his name. He was and is, one of my very favorite paleo-artists, along with Rudolf Zallinger, Charles R. Knight, and Zdenek Burian. 

As for African tigers themselves, according to Leakey, they found skulls that appeared to be tiger skulls, as they lacked a portion of bone found in lions, but not tigers. The skulls of the two species are still very similar though, and its possible that this was still a misidentification. The thing is, I've never and I mean NEVER encountered another mention of prehistoric African tigers in any other source and I've read a lot since. On the other hand, I've never heard Leakey's tiger theory refuted either. 

Other than that, the creatures featured are: libitheriun, a giant antlered giraffid (often accompanied by modern okapis, which then roamed the savannas), Anchoerus, a giant prehistoric warthog, peloravis, a giant relative of the modern cape buffalo, deinotherium, a giant elephant-like beast with downward cuving tusks (I already knew of that one at the time, hippopotomus gorgops, a giant hippo with eye-stalks, a calictotherium, ancient kin to the horse and rhino, gigantic baboons far larger than the living chakmas,...
and proconsul, a small ape that may have been a distant ancestor of humanity as the jungles began to thin out replaced by grasslands. 

It has since been discovered that the giant warthog did NOT have those four sweeping tusks. Leakey misidentified those, which actually belonged to a prehistoric elephant, maybe a gomphothere. 

But there's a window of possibility for the tigers. 








































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