ON THE EXTINCT ANIMALS OF THE COLONIES OF GREAT BRITAIN. 27 1 
yielding the required dental evidence, I contented myself with 
giving figures of the tooth in question,* in order to attract 
-attention to any fossils which might show such a tooth associated 
with more of the animal’s dentition. 
In the course of a few years I received the requisite evidence. 
First, in the form of a lower jaw, from the bed of the Condamine 
Kiver, Queensland ; next, in that of a mutilated skull, from the 
bed of a lake eighty miles south-west of Melbourne ; and sub- 
sequently, by more perfect specimens demonstrative of the 
super-carnivorous character of the dentition of the extinct beast, 
which thereupon I called Thylacoleo , or pouched lion. Teeth 
like the canine tusks of the lion precede the carnassial tooth 
first discovered ; that tooth is followed, also as in the lion, by one 
small tubercular tooth in the upper jaw, opposed to two smaller 
tubercular s in the lower jaw ; the carnassial of that jaw worked 
upon the upper one like a shear-blade, and the extensive and 
smoothly worn surfaces are matched by those of the flesh-cutters 
in old lions and hyaenas of the present day. 
Thus it appears that Australia was formerly inhabited by 
mammals of the peculiar marsupial type, not only varied for 
predatory and herb-eating life, but exhibiting their type under 
dimensions as varied as are the higher or placental wild beasts 
of the larger continents of the globe. Creatures nearest of kin 
to the Australian forms, and, like them, marsupial, have indeed 
lived and bred on land which now forms part of the island of 
Great Britain. Fossil remains of a carnivorous mammal with a 
dentition most nearly like that of Thylacoleo , have been dis- 
covered at Purbeck, on the Dorsetshire coast. Fossil remains 
of an insectivorous marsupial, many-toothed like the Australian 
Myrmecobius , have been found in Oxfordshire, in the slates of 
Stonesfield. Both these localities are of the middle or “ Meso- 
zoic ” period in geology, and I may give an idea of their antiquity 
by saying that not a particle of the chalk cliffs or “ bushless 
downs ” in England had been formed when the old pre-Britannic 
continent flourished which, in its vegetation, its shells, the 
fishes of its sea-shore, and the beasts of its fields, bore the nearest 
resemblance, in fauna and flora, to the antipodean seat of our 
present flourishing Australian Colonies. W e are now superseding 
there the Oolitic types, which alone presented themselves to the 
naturalists of Cook’s voyage, by the higher forms of vegetable 
and animal life that have lent themselves, or been by man 
adapted, to his special needs in Asia and Europe. 
But the kangaroo, which Banks and Solander first saw, and 
thought to be a huge bird as it hopped out of their ken into the 
* Plate xxxii., figs. 10 and 11, of Appendix to the “ Three Expeditions/' 
&c. 8vo. 1838. 
