176 MAMMALS OF THE PACIFIC WORLD 



of marsupials, a few egg-laying mammals, and a number of 

 peculiar bats and rats, especially the water rats and giant rats. 

 Native mammals of other orders — insectivores, carnivores, un- 

 gulates, and primates (except man himself) — are absent, except 

 in the cases of the wild descendants of animals brought by man. 

 The Australian and Papuan Subregions based upon geography 

 are not wholly satisfactory. The savannas of the extreme south 

 of New Guinea are f aunistically Australian ; the rain forests of 

 North Queensland are inhabited in part by species belonging to 

 genera characteristic of New Guinea. 



The Australian Subregion is populated mainly by primitive 

 and ancient mammalian types, including a wide variety of kanga- 

 roos and wallabies, possums and flying phalangers, the koala, 

 the wombat, bandicoots, the marsupial mole, the marsupial ant^ 

 eater, the Tasmanian devil, marsupial or "tiger" cats, mar- 

 supial mice, and finally the egg-laying monotremes which include 

 the duckbill and spiny anteater. This fauna has probably been 

 in Australia for millions of years, but there is little doubt that 

 the first marsupials reached Australia from the northwest. At 

 that time the present chain of East Indian islands may have 

 connected with Asia. The pioneer marsupials which were prob- 

 ably small arboreal mammals, some perhaps a little like the 

 American opossums and others like the modern Australian pha- 

 langers, can have reached the Australian Region on natural 

 rafts almost as easily as across such a land bridge. From those 

 pioneer forms the various families of Australian marsupials 

 have branched out adaptively to take the places filled in other 

 parts of the world by true carnivores, insectivores, squirrels, 

 and hoofed mammals. During Pleistocene time — the ice ages — 

 the Australian marsupials were even more varied than they are 

 today ; they included kangaroos as large as donkeys, a ground- 

 living phalanger as large as a lion and with great shearing 

 teeth, giant wombats bigger than tapirs, and a massive clumsy 

 beast that must have compared in size with the hippopotamus. 



The many peculiar rats of Australia came long after the 



