EVOLUTION OF CARNIVORA 
II. SEA CARNIVORA — PINNIPEDIA 
Sea Bears or Fur Seals (Otariide) . . . . . . Eastern Pacific. 
Walruses (Trichechide). . . . oe. 4. « . . Subarctic Oceans. 
Hair Seals (Phocida) . . oe hs aS . Cosmopolitan. 
All of these families were well separated long before the 
present geological era, and some of them go back to the dawn 
of the Tertiary, when the Carnivora were beginning to take 
definite characteristics as a great branch of animal development. 
In speaking of the Creodonta it was said that that order had 
disappeared at the close of the Mesozoic, but that there were 
indications that in one direction —that led by the family 
Miacide — descendants might be traced in the next 
succeeding era, the Eocene. The remains of Eocene 
carnivorous mammals, however, are very few, and often of 
doubtful identity; and at best there exists a long gap in 
structure as well as in time between them and their supposed 
ancestors among the creodonts. Their fossil skeletons combine 
in a puzzling manner features that afterward become distinctive 
of separate families, z.e. they are synthetic, or generalized, types. 
Evolution. 
More material has been obtained from the Miocene formations, but the 
specimens still show a generalized condition, in which doglike and civet- 
like features seem most prominent, leading to the conclusion that the canine 
type is the oldest and most central stock, whence the modern diversity has 
gradually branched off. Thus one of the oldest-known fossil carnivores 
is the European Cynodictis (in several varieties), which has been called a 
“viverrine dog” because it is such a combination of civet and fox. This 
shades off into the many species of Galecynus, and of Amphicyon, planti- 
grade animals existing in all parts of the Miocene world, and varying in 
size from that of a small fox to that of a long-bodied bear, — a huge com- 
bination of wolf, mungoos, and bear! Others of the same or a later time 
are more nearly typical civets, or stand between such and the linsangs, or 
connect civets and weasels; while at the beginning of the next, or Pliocene, 
period, there appears a curious animal, the ictithere, which completely 
unites the civets with the hyenas. 
Amphicyon was plantigrade and had other bearlike characteristics. 
Beside it, as we know from Miocene fossils, lived another animal (Hemi- 
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