226 NATURAL HISTORY. 



Remains of these fossil Opossums have been found in the North American Pliocene deposits. The 

 more ancient deposits of Australia have not yielded the remains of any of the animals which are 

 now so peculiar to the province, but in the bone caves of the Wellington Valley, some two hundred 

 and ten miles west of Sydney, Sir Thomas Mitchell discovered a mass of bones, forming a breccia 

 with limestone, which contained numerous and most interesting Marsupial remains. In deposits 

 of the same late age, and in bogs and gravels in Queensland, other remains were found. They 

 were described by Sir R. Owen in one of his greatest works, and they belong to the Australian 

 families of Marsupials, and not to the American Didelphidse. As was usual elsewhere before the 

 appearance of man on the earth, and contemporaneously with him for awhile, many of the kinds 

 which resemble more or less those now living, or would be classified in the same family, and perhaps in 

 the same genus, are gigantic. Owen distinguished among the bones those of large fossil Marsupials 

 which belong to the Macropodidee, and which may be arranged as subdivisions of the genus Macropus 

 or Kangaroos, and of a powerful creature called Thylacoleo, or Pouched Lion, which must be admitted 

 as a new section of the Macropodidae, and whose habits were probably carnivorous, although there is 

 much diversity of opinion on the subject, some of the most distinguished anatomists believing the 

 creature to have been of an innocent disposition, although appearances are much against it. It is 

 more closely allied to Plagiaulax, of the English Purbeck beds, than to any other form, and they well 

 fit in between the genera Macropus and Hypsipiymnus. 



A huge Marsupial, with a skull three feet in length, with teeth, in front especially, on the 

 Kangaroo plan, and with longer fore limbs and shorter hind ones than the last-named animal, was 

 described by Owen. The pelvis, however, has but two sacral vertebrae, and its ilio-pubic process 

 would ally it with the Macropodidse. This Diprotodon was an herbivorous animal, and was of the 

 size of a Rhinoceros. This great Marsupial had fore limbs which possessed the power of rotation, and 

 it was not without some characters which are seen amongst the Wombats. It appears to have 

 had a great range, for its remains have been found in the caverns in the Wellington Valley, at 

 Welcome Springs, South Australia, Hergolt's Springs, 500 miles north of Adelaide, near Melbourne, 

 in the valley of the Condamine River, and widely over Queensland. A slightly smaller animal, called 

 the Nototherium, also existed with the larger one. 



The species of this genus have no lower incisive tusks, and a very short chin ; the angle of the 

 jaw is curved inwards, and there were only four molar teeth on each side in both jaws, and they 

 were with two strong roots or fangs. It was probably one of the Macropodidse. Others of this 

 family are allied to Dendrolagus, and form the genera Protemnodon and Sthenurus. The Wombat 

 was represented in the age of the great Marsupials; and both large and small species, one being of 

 the size of the Tapir, have been described from bones and teeth which were found in the cave deposits 

 of Australia. Remains of a Marsupial animal, probably of the Vulpine Phalanger, were found in 

 the same caves, as were also some referable to the genus Perameles, or Bandicoots, and to the 

 Potoroos. Several fossil species of the family Dasyuridse have been found in the Australian caves, 

 and one of them is referable to a section of the genus Dasyurus, which at present is restricted to Van 

 Diemen's Land, it being somewhat like Dasyurus iirsimw; moreover, probably, there was a species of 

 Thylacinus present also. So far as is known from the researches of Owen amongst this wonder- 

 ful cave fauna, no members of the family Didelphidse occur there. They were American then, as 

 they are now. 



