During this time a very peculiar fauna grew up in South America,
some of the types resembling nothing now existing, while others are
recognizable as ancestral forms of the ant-eaters, sloths, and
armadillos of to-day. It was a peculiar and diversified mammalian
fauna, of, on the whole, rather small species, and without any
representatives of the animals with which man has been most familiar
during his career on this earth.
Towards the end of the tertiary period there was an upheaval of land
between this old South American island and North America, near what is
now the Isthmus of Panama, thereby making a bridge across which the
teeming animal life of the northern continent had access to this queer
southern continent. There followed an inrush of huge, or swift, or
formidable creatures which had attained their development in the
fierce competition of the arctogaeal realm. Elephants, camels, horses,
tapirs, swine, sabre-toothed tigers, big cats, wolves, bears, deer,
crowded into South America, warring each against the other incomers
and against the old long-existing forms. A riot of life followed. Not
only was the character of the South American fauna totally changed by
the invasion of these creatures from the north, which soon swarmed
over the continent, but it was also changed through the development
wrought in the old inhabitants by the severe competition to which they
were exposed.
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