CHAPTER XIV 



HISTORY OF THE CARNIVORA 



The story of the hoofed mammals, as sketched in brief 

 outUne in the preceding chapters (VIII-XIII), is a curious 

 mixture of relatively full and satisfactory paragraphs, with 

 scanty, broken and unintelligible ones, not to mention those 

 which have not yet been brought to light at all. With all its 

 gaps and defects, which inhere in the nature of things, the 

 history of the various ungulate series is the best that the 

 palaeontology of mammals has to offer and constitutes a very 

 strong and solid argument for the theory of evolution. For 

 the Carnivora the story is less complete and for obvious reasons. 

 Individual abundance was a very large factot in determining 

 the chances of preservation in the fossil state for any given 

 species, and, as a rule, whole skeletons are found only when the 

 species was fossilized in large numbers. In any region the 

 Carnivora are less numerous than the herbivora upon which 

 they prey, and while most ungulates live in larger or smaller 

 herds, the carnivores are mostly solitary. 



The Carnivora are divisible into three well-marked sub- 

 orders, called respectively the Pinnipedia, Fissipedia and 

 fCreodonta. The Pinnipedia, seals, walruses, etc., which 

 are almost purely marine in habitat, are not dealt with in 

 this book, since so little can be learned of them from the 

 fossils, and the fCreodonta, an extremely ancient and primi- 

 tive group, will be treated separately. The Fissipedia are 

 chiefly terrestrial, though they include the otters, and their 

 subdivisions, so far as the American forms are concerned, are 



516 



