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

THE GREAT EXTINCTIONS 267
in which enormous quantities of bones (and even parts of
bodies)
are found:
In many places the Alaskan muck is packed with animal bones and
debris in trainload lots. Bones of mammoth, mastodon, several kinds
of bison, horses, wolves, bears, and lions tell a story of a faunal popu-
lation. . . .
The Alaskan muck is like a fine, dark gray sand. . . . Within this
mass, frozen solid, lie the twisted parts of animals and trees intermingled
with lenses of ice and layers of peat and mosses. It looks as
though in the midst of some cataclysmic catastrophe of ten thousand
years ago the whole Alaskan world of living animals and plants was
suddenly frozen in midmotion in a grim
charade. . . .
Throughout the Yukon and its tributaries, the gnawing currents
of the river had eaten into many a frozen bank of muck to reveal
bones and tusks of these animals protruding at all levels. Whole
gravel bars in the muddy river were formed of the jumbled fragments
of animal remains. . . . (212:90-92).
In a later chapter Professor Hibben writes:
The Pleistocene period ended in death. This is no ordinary extinc-
tion of a vague geological period which fizzled to an uncertain end.
This death was catastrophic and all-inclusive. . . . The large animals
that had given their name to the period became extinct. Their death
marked the end of an era.
But how did they die? What caused the extinction of forty million
animals? This mystery forms one of the oldest detective stories in the
world. A good detective story involves humans and death. These
conditions are met at the end of the Pleistocene. In this particular
case, the death was of such colossal proportions as to be staggering to
contemplate. . . .
The "corpus delicti" of the deceased in this mystery may be found
almost everywhere ... the animals of the period wandered into
every corner of the New World not actually covered by the ice sheets.
Their bones lie bleaching on the sands of Florida and in the gravels
of New Jersey. They weather out of the dry terraces of Texas and
protrude from the sticky ooze of the tar pits of Wiltshire Boulevard
in Los Angeles. Thousands of these remains have been encountered
in Mexico and even in South America. The bodies lie as articulated
skeletons revealed by dust storms, or as isolated bones and fragments
in ditches or canals. The bodies of the victims are everywhere in evi-
dence.
It might at first appear that many of these great animals died