The geographical and geological distribution of animals / Angelo Heilprin.
- Angelo Heilprin
- Date:
- 1894
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The geographical and geological distribution of animals / Angelo Heilprin. Source: Wellcome Collection.
85/466 (page 59)
![have already been indicated. In the northwest and west it em- braces Spitzbergen and Iceland, and the numerous larger and smaller islands which lie between these and the mainland. Although this division has an east and west extent not far short of half the circumference of the globe, yet so great is its zoological unity “that the majority of the genera of animals in countries SO' far removed as Great Britain and Northern Japan are identical. Throughout its northern half the animal productions of the Palse- arctic region are very uniform, except that the vast elevated desert regions of Central Asia possess some characteristic forms; but in its southern portion we find a warm district at each extremity with somewhat contrasted features.”25 Zoology of the Eurasiatic Region.—Although the Eurasiatic fauna comprises representatives of thirty distinct families of Mam- malia, not a single one of these is absolutely confined, or is pecu- liar, to that region. Perhaps on the whole its most distinctive group of quadrupeds is that of the sheep and goats, forming the sub-family Cap rinse of the Bovidse (oxen). There are represented in this group some twenty-two or twenty-three species (belonging to the genera Capra and Ovibos), which, with four or five excep- tions, are either absolutely confined within the limits of the re- gion, or just pass beyond it. The genus Capra, comprising the goats and ibexes on one side, and the sheep on the other, have an outlying Old World representative—a goat—in the “Warrya- to ” (Capra hylocrius) of the Neilgherries (Oriental realm), and an- other—a sheep, the moufflon (C. [Ovis] musimon)—in the larger- islands (Corsica, Sardinia, Crete) of the Mediterranean, and the mountains of Greece and Persia. A species of ibex (C. beden) inhabits the elevated districts of Egypt, Syria, and Sinai, and an- other (C. Yalie), possibly only a variety of the preceding, the high- lands of Abyssinia, just within the boundaries of the Ethiopian realm. The two American representatives of the family, the Pocky Mountain big-horn (C. [Ovis] montana) and the musk-ox (Ovibos moschatus), are both absolutely confined to the Holarctic tract. One, at least, of the two generally recognised species of camel, the Bactrian or two-humped species (Camelus Bactrianus), is at the present time entirely, or almost entirely, restricted to the Eur- asiatic region, and not unlikely the dromedary (C. dromedarius) was also at one time indigenous to it, although from the long-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28059050_0085.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
