236 REMARKS ON POST-TERTIARY PHASCOLOMYID.E, 



To begin with a general conclusion, the opinion which I have 

 previously ventured to express, namely, that the ossiferous deposits 

 of the Darling Downs and those of the Wellington Caves are not 

 upon the same palseontological horizon, receives support from the 

 phascolomine peculiarities of their respective contents. So far as 

 can be learned from the British and Queensland collections, the 

 cave wombats, P. latifrons, krefftii, and curvirostris, were not in 

 existence when the Queensland breccias and turbaries were laid 

 down ; and, on the other hand, P. parvus and the species to be 

 described in the sequel had disappeared before the Wellington 

 caves received their contents. It would not be reasonable to 

 accept in explanation of the apparent facts the supposition that 

 they inhered in contemporaneous but diversely conditioned faunas. 

 The habitats were too near to each other and persisted under 

 geographical conditions too similar in kind, and on the whole too 

 continuous one with another to leave any plausibility in the 

 suggestion. But if the faunas were successive, as the alternative 

 supposition must affirm, they denote the limits of a great interval 

 of time, of a space sufficient to effect in this particular instance the 

 extinction of two and the development of three species. The lapse 

 of some considerable part of this interval has probably been notified 

 to us by certain fossils which show that one of the associations 

 characteristic of the Nototherian age, Ceratodus with a fresh water 

 saurian, was still permanent in Southern Queensland when the 

 denudation of the basalt had so far progressed as to cause the 

 formation, in suitable positions, of deep beds of " black soil." 

 Teeth of the fish and alligator with other vertebrate remains, 

 (includinga piece of a chelonian carapace of great thickness identical 

 with fragments from the Downs), all evidencing a first burial in situ, 

 have been met with near Brisbane at a depth of 80 feet in a dark 

 basaltic loam with celestine and other derivative minerals. These 

 interesting fossils are deposited in the Queensland Museum. 



A second conclusion is that that no living species of wombat has 

 come down to us from the age of the Condamine beds. This is an 

 assertion which contradicts accepted evidence, and will, therefore, 



