The Earth's Shifting Crust by Charles Hapgood - wire of information

THE GREAT EXTINCTIONS 257
this isn't true after all?" All I can then do is to point to
some tangible evidence that exactly this sort of thing hap-
pened in another part of the earth. But to examine this evidence
we must turn aside into one of the byways of science,
and examine an unsuspected facet of the Wisconsin glaciation.
We must return to North America, and reconstruct the
story of the birth of that icecap.
7. The Mastodons of New York
About seventy-five years ago, considerable excitement was
aroused in scientific and popular circles by the discovery of
the remains of extinct animals in various parts of the United
States. Perhaps the most sensational of these finds was that
of the mastodons. Many of these were found in New York
State, and in some cases they were so well preserved that it
was still possible to analyze the contents of the animals'
stomachs. Some extensive accounts of these mastodons have
appeared in print (178, 309, 203). Since science, like clothing,
has its fashions, a period of attention to the mastodons was
followed by a period of neglect. Neglect did not overtake
them, however, before conclusions were reached respecting
them. It was noted that nearly all the best-preserved remains
were found in bogs and swamps, where, it was assumed, they
had been mired and sucked down to their deaths.
This explanation of their deaths was accepted, apparently
without any dissent, and it involved, of course, the acceptance
also of the opinion that the animals had inhabited New York
State after the departure of the ice sheet. It was concluded
that the animals were postglacial. The conclusion was inevi-
table, because the ice sheet would have plowed up all bogs,
and the animals' bodies could not have been preserved from
destruction by it.
So the matter rested the mastodons ceased to attract at-
tention. There followed a period during which the general
trend of scientific opinion led finally to the view that neither