302 EXTINCT MONSTERS 
to have resembled a modern Wombat. The restored skeleton 
shown in Plate LV. will be presently explained. The history 
of the gradual discovery of this strange marsupial may now be 
briefly given, since it serves to show how little ground there is for 
the popular belief that a Cuvier or an Owen could “restore” a 
whole animal from a jaw, or even a single tooth! Sir R. Owen 
himself was obliged to admit that his first conclusion, drawn from 
Fic. 112.—Skull of Diprotodon, a kind of Wombat, from Pleistocene strata, 
Australia. A man’s skull placed for comparison. 
part of a jaw of Diprotodon, was quite wrong, as we shall see from 
the following account. 
The name! was given by Owen to part of a lower jaw of the 
creature, obtained by Sir Thomas Mitchell in the Wellington 
Caves, New South Wales. Five years later, a drawing of part of 
a jaw with teeth reached England from the same source, and this 
Sir R. Owen believed to represent a kind of Dinotherium, indi- 
cating, for the first time, the occurrence of primitive elephants in 
Australia! In the same year, a portion of a molar tooth, associated 
1 Greek—dis, twice ; protos, first ; odous, tooth. 
