106 ON THE PHALA.NGISTID.E OF THE POST-TERTIARY 



The following notes accounting for determinations made at 

 different times, as the fossils presented themselves, are offered as 

 they were written. 



Koalemus, a progenitor of the Koala. — 



The Koala, or Native Bear, is now one of the few types of 

 Australian life which has not been recognised as a part of its 

 ancient economy : yet it is one of which no one could be surprised 

 to find an ancestral form among the past modifications of marsupial 

 structure. Apart from the necessity of supposing that a member 

 so far removed from its tribe has passed through unknown stages 

 of segregation, we are invited by the jungle-loving Crowned Pigeon 

 and Musk Rat to believe that a land clothed, as they tell U3, with 

 vegetation of tropical luxuriance was neither powerless to sustain, 

 nor slow to mould, a host of tree-dwellers more numerous and 

 varied than it can do in the comparative barrenness of its latter 

 days, and among them ' Native Bears.' But for a positive trace of 

 such an animal the writer has, until now, waited and searched in 

 vain. The fossil which has at length given the clue required is the 

 end of a long bone, which fortunately happens to be sufficiently 

 characteristic to determine the status of its erstwhile possessor as 

 one closely allied to, bat not congeneric with, the recent genus 

 Phascolarcto?. This animal it is proposed to distinguish by the 

 name — Koalemus* ingens. 



Distal end of left fibula. — 



It has been recordedf that the external wall of the epecto- 

 sphyrej is in the Wombats impressed by a shallow groove. Of 



* Gr. Koiilemos, a stupid fellow. It would be a curious coincidence if 

 the Dative name Koala were also found to refer, as it well might, to the 

 stupidity of the living animal. 



f Owen, 



X No name has, to the writer's knowledge, been given to the process or 

 part external to the outer malleolus — it is, therefore, to avoid pleonasm, here 

 termed the epectosphvre in relation to the ectosphyre as, for like reason, the 

 outer malleolus may itself be designated. 



