EXTINCT AUSTRALIAN PACHTDERMATA. 119 



this huge extinct animal was allied both to the mastodon 

 and dinotherium. Fig. 80 represents the femur of this 

 extinct Australian Pachyderm — a, its transverse section ; 

 Figs. 81, 82, two views of the portion of a molar tooth 

 of the same. These fossils, now in the museum of the 

 Royal College of Surgeons, cannot, observes Professor 

 Owen, be contemplated without suggesting many inter- 

 esting reflections. 



" They tell us plainly that the time was when 

 Australia's arid plains were trodden by the hoofs of 

 heavy Pachyderms; but could the land then have been, 

 as now, parched by long continued droughts, with dry 

 river-courses, containing here and there a pond of water ? 

 All the facts and analogies which throw light on the 

 habits of the extinct mastodons and dinotheres indicate 

 these creatures to have been frequenters of marshes, 

 swamps, or lakes. Other relations of land and sea than 

 now characterize the southern hemisphere, a different 

 condition of the surface of the land and of the meteoric 

 influences governing the proportion and distribution of 

 fresh-water on that surface, may therefore be conjectured 

 to have prevailed when huge Mastodontoid Pachyderms 

 constituted part of the quadruped population of Australia. 

 May not the change from a humid climate to the present 

 particularly dry one have been the cause, or chief cause, 

 of the extinction of such Pachyderms ? Was not the 

 ancient Terra Australis, when so populated, of greater 

 extent than the present insular continent ? The mutual 

 dependencies between large mammalian quadrupeds and 

 other members of the animal kingdom suggest other 

 reflections in connection with the present fossil. If the 

 extinct species ever so abounded as to require its redun- 

 dancy to be suppressed by a carnivorous enemy, then 

 some destructive species of this kind must have co-existed, 

 of larger dimensions than the extinct Dasyurus lamarms, 

 the ancient destroyer of the now equally extinct gigantic 

 Kangaroos, Macropm titan, &c., whose remains were 

 discovered in the bone-caves of Wellington Valley. 

 Extremely few coprophagous beetles have hitherto, we 

 believe, been found in Australia ; and the scarcity of 



