ON AN EXTINCT MAMMAL. 99 
The following Papers were read :— 
ON AN EXTINCT MAMMAL OF A GENUS 
AP Ae NOY NENW: 
BY 
C. ‘W. DE. VIS, ‘M.A. 
(Read on 5th August, 1887.) 
(Pirate IP Tro EV:) 
AmoncsT late gatherings from the bone ‘beds of the Darling 
Downs there is scarcely anything of greater interest than the skull 
submitted for examination. It is not merely that we recognize 
in it an additional member of the company of large mammals 
which flourished where now indigenous life is limited in variety, 
scanty in number, and puny in size. We were prepared for such 
and further such discovery by numerous fragments of large bones 
for which ownership is still to be found. Nor is it only that the 
features of this our new acquaintance are peculiar, but it is that 
from such peculiarity we may infer that the physical conditions 
which by their diversity, as well as vigour, occasioned the 
eccentricity of type here manifested, must have ruled for a long 
period sufficient that is to produce and establish so great a modi- 
fication. To our shame be it spoken we have not as yet sought 
to determine by geological research the probable duration in the 
past of life as it is. We do not even know, we only surmise, the 
nature of the changes which closed the door on the old life and 
reopened it grudgingly for the new; but we may be sure from 
the extraordinary differentiations in mammalian, from which those 
changes extinguished, that it was no evanescent period of pros- 
perity which called them into being, no case of the fat kine 
replacing the lean kine so well known to our experience, but 
whatever the cause of the climatic difference it was an inheritance 
of age after age of abundant moisture married to soil, which we 
in the plentitude of our wisdom, skill, and power have so far 
allowed to lie sterilised by lack of water. 
The group to which our newly discovered animal belonged 
consisted in Queensland of some seven or eight species of mar- 
supials, half of them as yet unnamed, huge in bulk, heavy of limb, 
and slow of gait, ranging downwards in size from Diprotodon, 
