Imagine time pushed back a million years. A saber-toothed tiger creeps silently toward the black pools which we know as the La Brea tar pits near Los Angeles. He is a powerful beast with nine-inch canine teeth curving down like sabers. In the pool two giant ground sloths struggle to free themselves from the gummy tar. The saber-tooth leaps toward the nearest sloth. In the struggle his feet are caught in the deathly clutch of the tar. Slowly both beasts are sucked into the black depths of the asphalt pool.

We know this is a true story because scientists have dug fossil bones out of the La Brea tar pits. And from those fossils, they have learned about the strange beasts that roamed through southern California during the Ice Age. Other fossil deposits in America, in Asia, and in Europe give the story of even stranger beasts, some of which lived as much as forty or fifty million years ago.

One was the Beast of Baluchistan which was bigger than two school buses piled on top of each other. Another was the shovel-jawed mastodon which stood eight feet high at the shoulder and had a lower jaw almost as long as it was tall. Another was they tiny horse, hardly bigger than a cat.

In All About Strange Beasts of the Past, Dr. Roy Chapman Andrews tells the amazing story of these early mammals and the scientific expeditions which have unearthed their fossil remains.

From the dust jacket