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In place of the petty phalangers and pouched ant-eaters of the oolitic period, our tertiary strata in the larger continents show us a rapid and extraordinary development of the mammalian race into monstrous creatures, some of them now quite extinct, and some still holding their own undisturbed in India, Africa, and the American prairies.
In the ages succeeding the deposition of the red marl Europe seems to have been broken up into an archipelago of coral reefs and atolls; and the islands of this ancient oolitic ocean were tenanted by numbers of tiny ancestral marsupials, some of which approached in appearance the pouched ant-eaters of Western Australia, while others resembled rather the phalangers and wombats, or turned into excellent imitation carnivores, like our modern friend the Tasmanian devil.
The true Vulpine Opossum which is a native of Australia, near Port Jackson is very much like a small fox; but there are two sub-genera of the phalangers that differ much from this form. One of these is the Scham-scham, a very beautiful spotted creature found in the Molucca and Papuan islands.
There are several species of them in Australia and the adjacent islands. The Phalangers, or Fox Opossums, come next in order.
Several other species of phalangers inhabit these and other Asiatic islands, especially Celebes and New Ireland. The other sub-genus is that of the Flying Squirrels, usually known as Norfolk Island Flying Squirrels, though it is not even certain that they inhabit the last-mentioned island.
But of these two solitary representatives of the later and higher Asiatic fauna 'more anon'; for the present we may regard it as approximately true that aboriginal and unsophisticated Australia in the lump was wholly given over, on its first discovery, to kangaroos, phalangers, dasyures, wombats, and other quaint marsupial animals, with names as strange and clumsy as their forms.
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