BY C. W. DE VIS. 243 



as a proved fact that P. mitchelli is not synonymous with P. 

 platyrhinus. Against this it will be urged that naturalists of 

 approved sagacity and wide experience have seen reason to come 

 to the opposite conclusion. That they have done so is not at all 

 surprising. There is no difficulty in believing that there is, on the 

 whole, sufficient resemblance in cranial and dental characters to 

 lead observers who were compelled to trust to those characters 

 alone to the decision they have announced. But it is questionable 

 whether we ought to trust to them alone so implicitly as to pro- 

 nounce an unreserved opinion in cases where material is scanty, 

 specialization feeble and apt to be obscured by the accidents of 

 burial, and where the question is between a living animal and 

 a companion of extinct species. The present is not the first 

 experience which has convinced me that such a course may lead 

 to error. 



P. mitchelli is, however, not the only wombat of its size which 

 found burial in the Darling Downs deposits, though the only one 

 to which the bones already noticed could have belonged. There 

 was a species distinguishable almost at a glance by the narrowness 

 of its teeth, which are intermediate in breadth between those of 

 P. parvus and P. mitchelli, though serially as long as or longer than 

 in the latter species. As a marked reduction in the width of the 

 teeth has not been noted in the descriptions of known species, and 

 as the teeth in all the mandibles of P. mitchelli are appreciably 

 the same in width, I must perforce regard this narrow-toothed 

 wombat as a new species, for which the name angustidens may be 

 appropriate. 



Mandibular characters : — Teeth narrow, in a relatively long 

 series ; posterior molars oblique ; premolar large, subrectangular, 

 with its long axis in the axis of the jaw ; symphysis rather short. 



The species is founded on four mandibular specimens, two of 

 them from the same mandible. The more perfect of the latter 

 shows the whole of the dentary limb from the incisor outlet to 

 the base of the coronoid process with all the teeth except the 

 incisor in place. The length of the molar series is 52-5 mm., in an 



