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Associated with this last were remains of not less than thirty mammiferous quadrupeds, including three species of rhinoceros, a large anoplotherium, three species of deer, two antelopes, a true dog, a large cat, an animal like a weasel, a small hare, and a huge species of the edentata. Both of these places are considerably to the north of any region now inhabited by the monkey tribes.
They overlie the uppermost of an extensive series of Eocene deposits of marine, brackish, and fresh-water formations, which rest on the Chalk and terminate upward in strata corresponding in age to the Paris gypsum, and containing the same extinct genera of quadrupeds, Palaeotherium, Anoplotherium, and others which Cuvier first described. Corbula pisum. Cyrena semistriata. Cerithium elegans.
I refer to Cuvier's investigation of the mammalian fossils yielded by the quarries in the older tertiary rocks of Montmartre, among the chief results of which was the bringing to light of two genera of extinct hoofed quadrupeds, the Anoplotherium and the Palaeotherium.
I said just now that, in the existing Fauna, the group of pig-like animals and the group of ruminants are entirely distinct; but one of the first of Cuvier's discoveries was an animal which he called the Anoplotherium, and which proved to be, in a great many important respects, intermediate in character between the pigs on the one hand, and the ruminants on the other Thus, research into the history of the past did, to a certain extent, tend to fill up the breach between the group of ruminants and the group of pigs.
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