120 THE WANDERINGS OF ANIMALS [CH. 



many of the Placentals, for instance the rodent-like 

 wombat, phalangers resembling flying squirrels, 

 Notoryctes like a blind mole, the ant-eater Mjrme- 

 cobius, fleet pasturing herds of kangaroos and a fierce 

 wolf-like Tkyldcinus. 



It is of the greatest significance that all the recent 

 marsupials have feet modified for arboreal life (either 

 with an opposable hallux, or with the second and 

 third toes joined together) or at least show unmis- 

 takeable traces that their immediate ancestors have 

 passed through such an arboreal modification, even 

 the large kangaroos and the clumsy monster, Di- 

 protodon of Central Australian Pleistocene. They all 

 had been fitted for life in the trees, and when in 

 Australia this necessity was removed, some of them 

 again took to living on the ground. 



Edentates. 



Three dozen species, most of them in tropical 

 America, a few in Africa, India and Malaya, are 

 the survivors of an ancient assembly of terrestrial 

 mammals, which are reasonably supposed to be an 

 early offshoot of the Placentals. 



Scaly ant-eaters or pangolins, Manidae, date from 

 mid-Oligocene of France ; now mostly prehensile and 

 arboreal, in tropical Africa and India to Celebes ; 

 absent from Madagascar. 



