466 
THE LIVING WORLD 
MARSUPIALS. 
The Marsupials, or Pouched Animals, are curious from their appearance 
and habits, highly considered by hunters, and of interest to naturalists. Their 
organization is higher than that of the preceding class and they require for 
the support of life conditions less favorable than do those of the group last 
described. The marsupials , as we know them, like the monotremes, are 
not typical forms but varieties of these, so that succession in the 
order of animal life requires that these two families be studied by. means 
of fossil remains. This study, unpromising at first sight, becomes of interest 
so soon as those who visit our museums have been supplied with an intelligent 
object and sufficient stimulus to cause their curiosity to lead them to a per¬ 
sonal examination of specimens. The Metatheria, or Fossil Marsupials have 
pubic bones, double system of teeth, five-toed feet, besides one or two other 
characteristics not of popular 
interest. The Dromo- 
therium (an American spe¬ 
cies represented solely by its 
lower jaw and teeth) was 
judged by the naturalists’ 
safest test, the teeth, to have 
been a pre-historic ant-eater. 
The Dryolestes seems to 
have been a small opossum 
whose progeny were to be¬ 
come relatively “ sons of 
Anak.” The subsidence of 
the continent of Australia 
is comparatively recent and 
its fossil remains, though 
gigantic in size, evidently 
belong to species still exist¬ 
ent. Still they serve to 
show that the founder of 
the marsupial family was at 
once carnivorous and herbi¬ 
vorous, and to suggest that 
of them favoring the kan¬ 
garoo type and becoming frugivorous, and others developing the other side of 
their possibilities and becoming dasyures and carnivora. The typical fossil is 
called Thybacoleo; the earliest kangaroo the Diprotodon or Nototheria; and 
the ancestors of the dasyures being named Phascolotherium ( amphilestes ), 
Amphitherium, Spalacotherium, or Triconodon. The manufactured names 
of the systematic zoologists have no great significance when translated, but as 
a name is only used for identification, any one about to visit a museum can 
copy the technical names and study such specimens as the museum possesses. 
In some of these forms the joining of the toes has proceeded so far as to 
give four toes instead of five, and to suggest the process by which a toed 
animal may in the lapse of time grow into one which has a solid hoof. 
With the marsupials , as with the monotremes and all other classes, we shall 
merlin’s (extinct) opossum. 
its successors developed along distinct lines, some 
