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

THE GREAT EXTINCTIONS 265
tected confervoid filaments, with cells arranged in linear series, resembling
species now found in our waters. Numerous black bodies,
probably spores of the mosses, were found in abundance. Not a fragment
of sphagnum was seen in the deposit. I found, however, one
fragment of a water plant, possibly a rush, an inch long, every cell
of which was as distinct as though growing but yesterday. Pieces of
the woody tissue and bark of herbaceous plants, spiral vessels, etc.,
were abundant. Carapaces of Entomostraca were present, but no trace
of coniferous plants could be detected. It hence appears that the
animal ate his last meal from the tender mosses and boughs of flower-
ing plants growing on the banks of the streams and margins of the
swamps, rather than fed on submerged plants; and it is probable,
moreover, that the pines and cedars, and their allies, formed no part
of the mastodon's diet (203:58).
Here we see that everything indicates a climate similar to
that of New York today. An interesting point is the differ-
ence between the mastodon's diet indicated here and that
indicated in the case mentioned earlier. Speculation suggests
that perhaps the diet in this second case indicates the ani-
mal's preferred diet, or perhaps merely the diet available in
the summer, while that in the earlier case, in which twigs
were so important, may represent either the winter diet of
the mastodon or an emergency diet, the result of the de-
struction of the normal diet by the events occurring just be-
fore the animal's death. In any case, the second diet indicates
that whatever happened to that mastodon certainly took
place in the summer.
Now it is obvious that the arguments used to explain away
the evidence of climatic change in Siberia won't work in New
York. Here there was certainly climatic change, with a venge-
ance. The explanation I have offered for the preservation
of the Siberian remains will cover both cases. The great dif-
ference between them, aside from the failure of the Siberian
ice sheet to develop into a real icecap, consists of the fact that
while the melting of the thin Siberian ice sheet left a perma-
frost in which many remains could be preserved, the melting
of the Wisconsin icecap left temperate conditions in which
nothing could be preserved except what happened to find