THE ARGUMENT FROM PALEONTOLOGY 75 



New Guinea and adjacent islands ; phalangers to 

 Timor, the Moluccas, and Celebes. 



(ii.) American region. — The opossums are most 

 numerous in the forest region of Brazil, south of the 

 river La Plata; also west of the Andes in Chili. 

 Their distribution extends northwards to Mexico, 

 Texas, and California ; and in the States from 

 Florida to the Hudson river, and westwards to the 

 Missouri. 



Marsupials form a good example of discontinuous 

 distribution, the explanation of which is yielded by 

 fossils. Opossums are found in the Tertiary deposits 

 of England, France, in other parts of Europe, and in 

 North America. The Cretaceous period shows no 

 trace of them, but in the Jurassic, and in the yet 

 older Triassic, at the base of the Secondary series, 

 large numbers of mammalian remains of small size 

 have been found, which are considered to represent 

 the early phase in marsupial development. Here 

 the starting-point or birth place appears to have 

 been in the Old World, and the group to have 

 migrated southwards. 



C. Taperid^, or tapirs, are found in the equatorial 

 forests of South America, in the Andes of Ecuador, 

 in Panama and Guatemala, and also in the Malay 

 Peninsula, Sumatra, and Borneo. Geological evi- 

 dence shows that during the Miocene and Pliocene 

 times, tapirs abounded over the whole of Europe 

 and Asia, and their remains are found in the Tertiary 

 deposits of France, India, Burmah, and China. In 

 both North and South America fossil remains of 

 tapirs occur only in caves and deposits of the Post- 



