642 
PROFESSOR OWEN ON THE PELVIC 
Thylacoleo f' and the testimony which Professor Flower citest in support of his 
doubts, may also have weight with many readers :—“ Mr. Gerard Ivrefft, the 
able Curator of the Australian Museum, Sydney, in the ‘ Annals and Magazine of 
Natural History/ vol. xviii., ser. 3, p. 146, 1866, gives his opinion that ‘this famous 
Marsupial Lion was not more carnivorous than the Phalangers of the present tim.e.’ ” 
The value of this testimony I leave to the judgment of the Fellows of the 
Royal Society of Sydney, and of the Linnean Society of the same capital of New 
South Wales.;[ 
Addendum. 
(Added August, 1883.) 
[Since the Report by the Referees on the preceding Paper was submitted to the 
Council of the Royal Society, I have received from the Secretary the following remark 
made by one of the Referees :— 
“ I think the value of the Paper would be enhanced if it contained a distinct state¬ 
ment whether the reference of the fossil to Thylacoleo is inferred or based on such 
circumstantial evidence as leaves no room for doubt in respect to its identification.” 
The following is submitted in compliance with the Secretary’s suggestion. The 
circumstantial evidence consists in the absence of any other fossils, showing a car¬ 
nivorous type of dentition, agreeing in size with limb-bones of like indication and 
corresponding size, save jaws and teeth, of a Thylacoleo. The arrival, subsequent to 
the reading of the Paper, of Mr. Ed. W. Ramsay, F.L.S., as Superintendent of the 
Australian Department of the Fisheries Exhibition, has added, by verbal details and 
supplementary specimens, direct confirmation of the deductions from his previous 
transmission of the described fossils. If no other specimens than the limb-bones 
had been received they would have impressed me with the conviction that a Carnivore 
exceeding in size the existing Thylacine, in the degree in which the Lion surpasses 
the Wolf, had co-existed with the Diprotodonts, Nototheriums, and other large 
phytophagous Marsupials. 
* “ What was the particular form of food associated with the most singular dentition of Thylacoleo , 
it would be hazardous to do more than conjecture. As the flora of the country in which this strange 
animal existed has probably undergone as great a change as the fauna, it is not unlikely that the material 
on which it subsisted has passed away with the creature itself. It may have been some kind of root or 
bulb ; it may have been fruit; it may have been flesh.” 
t “ On the Affinities and probable Habits of the extinct Australian Marsupial, Thylacoleo carnifex 
Owen,” Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, vol. xxiv., 1868. 
f Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, 8vo., 1883, p. 187 (“ On Tooth-marked 
Bones of Extinct Marsupials,” by Charles De Vis, B.A.). 
