238 



ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



Tapiridop. — The tapirs are the most primitive living perissodactyle, 

 retaining the primitive number of digits in fore and hind feet and the 

 primitive short-cro^\^led grinding teeth. They are to-day limited to the 

 East Indies and tropical America. In the Pleistocene, they inhabited 

 the Sonoran region and continental India and the marginal parts of the 

 Palffiarctic region. Their Tertiary ancestry has been traced back in Eu- 

 rope and in North America to the Oligocene Protapirus, which is pre- 

 ceded by a less direct ancestral series in the Eocene of North America; 





JV^ Tapirs . 

 U7i//Y Plei'stbcejTc 



Fig. 19. — Distribution of the Tapirs living (solid hlack) and Pleistocene (shaded) 



Ancestral types are found in the Tertiary formations of Europe and North America. 

 The relations of the two series and the Pleistocene and modern distribution indicate a 

 dispersal center in eastern Asia. 



l)ut ancestral tapirs have not been identified in the Eocene of Europe. 

 The data are insufficient to determine the center of dispersal except as 

 probably in the Palsearctic region. Tapirs are imknown in South Amer- 

 ica until the Pampean (Pleistocene) ; they do not appear to have reached 

 Africa at all. The arid climate of the Afro-Asiatic connection and the 

 heavily forested path of migration to the East Indies would seem to be 

 the features that determined the dispersal of the horses into Africa, the 

 tapirs into Malaysia. 



