PROFESSOR OWEN 
CH. VI. 
190 
fed on the leaves. With their great tails and 
huge heels firmly planted on the ground like a 
tripod, they could exert the full force of their 
most powerful arms and great claws. The 
mylodon was also furnished with a long tongue 
like a giraffe’s, which would help it to reach its 
leafy food with the aid of its long neck. Owen 
supported this conjecture of his by the following 
argument. 
He remarked that the particular skull he was 
describing had two severe fractures, both of which 
were longitudinal, not radiating like a smash in 
an egg-shell. One had partially and the other 
completely healed during the lifetime of the 
creature. These fractures, he stated, could not 
have been caused by blows from another animal, 
for they were severe enough to have nearly killed 
the mylodon, and would have, in that case, inevi- 
tably left him an easy and unresisting prey to his 
foe. But the mylodon had evidently got over 
the first blow he had received, as the fracture had 
healed. The probability was, then, that his habit 
was to uproot trees for the. purpose of feeding 
upon their leaves, and once, when so doing, the 
tree must have fallen with a crash upon his skull, 
before he had time to move his huge carcass out 
of the way, and that this fracture had apparently no 
sooner healed than the same thing had happened 
again. Now, the ‘cranial organisation’ of the 
mylodon was designedly modified in relation to 
