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About Medford mail tribune. (Medford, Or.) 1909-1989 | View Entire Issue (Dec. 19, 1954)
4 ; , i ; I I- i i : 1 1 r : Is S a' 2 -5 J J'- n i i. , . 4 I I- 5 Is That So? y Eugena Burnt Ranger-Naturalist : EVER WONDERED what one tipt those giant prehistoric mam mals truly looked like not the stuffed, papier-mache jobs in a .museum? One whose insides are there, whose bones are covered "'with meat and fat, and is wear- ing his. honest-to-goodness birth- er n -i- -t. b- h ' 9! day suit of natural fur? And, what he ate? If so, wonder no more. Such prehistoric mammals have been and are being found. Mammoth hairy elephants, last seen on earth 15,000 years ago, have been found intact, hide, meat and bones preserved in that great natural deep-freeze unit, the frozen Arctic wasteland of Siberia where for some myster ious reason these great animals made their last stand. Part of Man's History : This most recently - extinct member of the elephant family roamed the earth perhaps a half million years ago. But yet, it is a part of human history primi tive man hunted it. Pictures of this hairy mammoth are found in hunter's caves and 'a fragment of a mammoth tusk has been found in France on which some early hunter had , scratched a rough but unmistakable outline of the tusk's owner. The first perfectly preserved head of the hairy mammoth, a super-elephant, was found in 1707 in Siberia. Subsequently many others have been found, kept in the permafrost the per mantly frozen ground of Siberia where they are now being thawed out by the warming weather and river-bank cave-ins. They are so well preserved that dogs, foxes and wolves tear Dff chunks of the flesh and down it with gusto. The unpalatable heavy ivory has been finding its way to market in the last century, si ,3i. MAKE A PROFIT that's : worth while. Have extra dollars in your bill fold later r . . by putting savings tp .work with us. . FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS & LOAN ASS'N of Medford 27 North Holly An Institution Dedicated To Those Who av. thousands of tons of (these semi fossiled animals have yielded their valuable tusks. Fill into Ravines How did these extinct mon sters get there? Apparently, these lumbering beasts came to grief by tumbling into snow filled ravines from which they could not extricate themselves, froze up stiff, and were covered with drifting snov which packed into ice. And there they stayed, deep-frozen, perhaps something like 150 centuries!' In contrast to today's elephant, these hairy mammoths were bulkier and heavier although perhaps not quite as high, stand ing about 10 feet 6 inches at the shoulder. Their great tusks were spiral-curved the tail was quite short and the ears were small, smaller even than those of the small-eared Indian elephant. To withstand the rigors of the north, the mammoth had a four to six inch layer of pure .white fat over its dark meat muscle, an extremely heavy incn-thick skin, and outside of that a red dish' woolly coat covered with long black hairs up to 14 inches long. The guard hair grew in particularly heavy patches on cheeks, chin, shoulders, flanks and belly. Besides this heavy coating, it had a special adapta tion to cold climate its rear against the cold. Apparently, the beast was con structed to contend with food less seasons. It possessed two humps. One of them was above the shoulder, as one might expect for easy carrying, but the other, strangely enough, was on top of the massive head. In the most' remarkable find of its kind, even the last meal of one of these animals was pre served. In its mouth was still a chunk of food and its frozen stomach yielded 27 pounds of chewed undigested food consist ing of willow, larch, fir and pine tips; some ground-up fir cones, grass, wild ferns, wild thyme, and two kinds of mosses. Poppy and buttercup seeds were still adhering to its great teeth. Teeth Colossal - As for those teeth, they were colossal. The long surface of one molar measured 8 inches along the top grinding surface,' 2Yz inches across, and about 11 inches long. It weighed 12 pounds. , Its tusks in reality teeth, too sometimes reached a length of 10 feet and weighed 200 pounds! (The average African elephant's weigh less than a quarter that much today.) This hairy mammoth ranged through .the northern hemis sphere during the days when Siberia was a continuous land mass with Alaska, the North Sea was a fertile plain, and the British Isles were a part of the continent of Europe. Where is the best place to find yourself a deep-freeze mammoth today? A tiny one was found only six years ago in Alaska, buried in the permafrost. No doubt others remain. (Copyright. 1954 by Eugene "Burns) (DisJ, by McClure Newspaper Synd.) l : "v ' ' "' - X- "' ' 1 ' 4FFKr.TioATE GREETING is given Pamela Brown, 3, '"Little Miss Amvet," by President Eisenhower after she gave him 1954 "We Remember" seals in Christmas orphanage program. She is 1 20,000th homeless child to be given gift by Am vets. (International) Proof of Earth's Movement By J. HUGH PRUETT Astronomer. Extension Division Oregon Higher Education System Sincere seekers after truth are found among all ages. Recently two ninth grade girls wrote me regarding proofs of the move ments in the solar system. The difficulty in explaining to pupils of that, age is that many of the proofs may be beyond their abil ity to understand. The old-time '.Idea was that the earth was flat and motion less and was the center of the universe. All heavenly bodies were .thought to revolve , daily around this fixed and all-important earth. But there were a few deep students of nature long be fore the Christian era who held practically present, day views. One such was the Greek Aris tarchus of Samos, who was most active around 250 B.C. The. fel low countrymen of such men re viled them and accused them of trying to overturn the generally accepted religions of their time. The Italian Galileo in the 1600's was similarly persecuted for views now taught everywhere. Present-day seekers after truth often are denounced on religious grounds. We have hardly more space here than to mention the proofs that the earth is round, rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun. The great Copernicus in the mid-1500's was thorough ly convinced of the truths of these ideas, but lacking, proofs could only say they seemed more reasonable than the old views. With the advance of knowledge, definite proofs t are now at hand. Some of these cannot be under stood jwithout the knowledge of college mathematics and science. The proofs that the earth is spherical are the most simple. Ships sailing from land grad ually sink below the horizon, the hull first, then the ' upper structure, and finally the smoke. World travelers have entirely encircled the earth. During eclipses the edge of the earth's shadow on the moon is circular. The other planets are seen tele scopically as circular disks. The heavenly bodies seem to circle the earth daily because of our world's axial rotation, but this is not definite proof of ro tation. However, there are real evidences that it does rotate. Ob jects dropped from high eleva tions strike the ground a little east of the point directly under the place of release. Other proofs are the Foucault pendu lum, the deflection of moving bodies to the right in the north ern hemisphere and to the left in the southern, the Compton wheel and the fact that the other planets can be observed to ro tate. The sun seems to trace a com plete circle among the stars in a year. This is due to the earth's motion around old Sol, but is not proof of it. The proofs and these cannot be easily explained to high school freshmen are the aberration of light, the shift ing of the spectroscopic lines when our earth is approaching or" receding from a luminous body, and the annual parallax of stars. Copco To Complete Klamath Substation Klamath Falls (U.R) Klam ath Falls substation of the Cal ifornia Oregon Power. Company will be completed by Christmas day, District Manager Sam Ritch ey said. Total cost for the substation and transmission line is about Sunday, December 19, 1934 v MEDFORD (OREGON MAIL TRIBUNE FIVE $3,750,000. The interconnection with Bonneville Power : Admin istration is at Diamond Lake junction. ' ' Ritchey said six reactors, each weighing about 4$ tons, have been installed on concrete mats and equipped with porcelain in sulators.4 Their purpose is ; to lower voltage on the transmis sion c line from the Columbia river to 230,000 volts, insulators on the line have the effect of condensers,- Ritchey explained, and raise voltage above the 230,00f0 volt figure. Texas has 106.5 trillion cubic feet of natural reserves, or 50 per cent of the United States total. TYPEWRITERS & ADDING MACHINES Repaired MEDFORD OFFICE EQUIPMENT COMPANY 41 S. Grape- Phone 2-4100 Use Tribune Want Ads The M. H. de Young museum is San Francisco's largest mu seum. w !lnnnnrioy2 jnnanonoyx v- MJT TWD AYS ILEIFTT T MEdSISTEIffi. 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