GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMALS 



gonia had no animal that can be regarded as an ancestor of 

 any of those that are put in the second category — animals 

 like those of North America and the Old World. All the 

 mammals of that time and region were either such as gave 

 rise to the peculiar South American forms of the Pleistocene 

 and Recent epochs or such as died out without leaving any 

 descendants. There was a great assemblage of hoofed ani- 

 mals, but they were peculiar, unknown from any other part 

 of the world, and all are extinct and left no descendants in 

 the modern world. There were predaceous creatures, beasts 

 of prey, but no members of the order Carnivora, for these 

 ancient flesheaters of Miocene Patagonia were marsupials, 

 very like the so-called Tasmanian wolf (T/jylacynus) and 

 related to the opossums. Of the modern cats, wolves, 

 skunks, and other northern carnivorous animals there was 

 no trace; nor of the tapirs, peccaries, llamas, or deer of 

 to-day. There were rodents in great variety, but they were 

 all of the peculiar South American kinds; of the northern 

 rats, mice, squirrels, and rabbits there was not a single 

 representative. 



In contemporaneous (middle Tertiary) North America 

 there was an equally rich and varied mammalian fauna, but 

 one totally different from that of the southern continent and 

 very like that of the Old World. In addition to certain 

 characteristically North American groups, not yet known 

 from any other region, there were ancestral types of ele- 

 phants, rhinoceroses, horses, tapirs, peccaries, deer, ante- 

 lopes, camels, cats, sabre-tooth tigers, wolves, weasels, rac- 

 coons, rats and mice, squirrels, marmots, beavers, hares, and 

 rabbits. The assemblage is essentially that of the Old World, 

 though it shows certain local differences, and it is completely 

 unlike that of South America. 



About in the middle or perhaps in the later part of the 



[89] 



