128 FEMUR PROBABLY OF THYLACOLEO. 
coleo be, as it is held to be, a survival of the Plagiaulacide, 
the difficulty is minimised; we can understand the retention 
of the characters of the more generalised stock in the limb- 
bone concomitantly with a modification of the old specialisa- 
tion of the teeth for the particular needs of the survivor. 
Accepting it then (provisionally) as the femur of Thyla- 
coleo, we derive from it a better idea of that animal than 
the teeth alone can give us. Inthe wombat and Tasmanian 
devil, both short-headed animals like Thylacoleo, the 
length of the femur is one-fifth less than that of the 
cranium—in Thylacoleo it is one-fifteenth greater. In 
accordance, therefore, with the other indications of its 
saltatory, or at least subsaltatory, mode of progression, it 
appears to have had the hind limb relatively elongated. 
From its size (greater than that of a full-grown kangaroo) 
we can hardly suppose it to have been of arboreal or 
fossorial habits. We may therefore conceive it, so far, asa 
saltigrade carnivore, or rather ossivore, with a relatively 
large and short head, and presumedly short feet, armed 
with prehensile claws. Such an animal may not have been 
as fell a destroyer as its name implies, or even as were its 
smaller contemporaries, Thylacinus and Sarcophilus, but 
its functions, though restricted to clearing away the dead 
and dying from amongst the living, were no less useful. 
Poetry must reluctantly give place to lowlier prose. 
