Fossil Molar Tooth of the Mastodon Australis. 573 



communication to the * Annals' (p. 9, figs. 2 and 3), I find that 

 the reference to that portion of tooth to the genus Dinotherium 

 was premature and erroneous. The extinct species to which it be- 

 longed does, indeed, combine molar teeth like those of the Dinothe- 

 rium with two large incisive tusks* in the lower jaw, but these tusks 

 incline upwards instead of bending downwards, and are identical in 

 form and structure with the tusk from one of the bone-caves of Wel- 

 lington Valley, described by me in Sir T. Mitchell's ■ Expeditions into 

 the Interior of Australia/ vol. ii. 1838, p. 362. pi. 31, figs. 1 and 2, 

 as indicative of a new genus and species of gigantic marsupial ani- 

 mal*, to which I gave the name of Diprotodon australis. 



It is not my present object to describe these most interesting ad- 

 ditional fossils of the Diprotodon, or to enter into the question whe- 

 ther the great femur before alluded to belonged, like the fragment of 

 tooth transmitted with it, to the Diprotodon, or to a different and 

 larger animal ; but briefly to make known the more decisive evidence 

 of the former existence of a large Mastodontoid quadruped in Aus- 

 tralia, which is afforded by the tooth figured, on the scale of half an 

 inch to one inch, in the subjoined cuts. 



Fig. 1. 



Mastodon australis, half nat. size. 

 If these figures be compared with those of the molar teeth of the 

 Mastodon angustidens, reduced to the same scale, in Cuvier's * Osse- 

 mens Fossiles,' 4to. vol. i., ' Divers Mastodontes,' pi. 2. fig. 11, pi. 

 3, fig. 2, or with that of the more abraded molar, pi. 1 , fig. 4, they 

 will be seen to present a generic and almost specific identity. 



t See also my paper " On the Classification of Marsupialia," Zool. Trans, vol. ii. p. 332, 

 in which the Diprotodon is placed with the Wombat in the family ' Phaxcolomyidce.' 



4 E 



