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Updated: June 11, 2025
Even these must have been driven away from the greater part of the area; only those Miocene mammals which had passed into Hindostan and into South Africa would escape decimation by such changes in the physical geography of Arctogaea.
The only type present in the Miocene, but absent in the existing, fauna of Eastern Arctogaea, is that of the Didelphidoe, which, however, remains in North America.
I confess I am strongly inclined to surmise that these last, at any rate, are remnants of the population of Austro-Columbia before the Miocene epoch, and were not derived from Arctogaea by way of the north and east.
Even these must have been driven away from the greater part of the area; only those Miocene mammals which had passed into Hindostan and into South Africa would escape decimation by such changes in the physical geography of Arctogaea.
But, after these great areas were thus peopled, came the Glacial epoch, during which the excessive cold, to say nothing of depression and ice-covering, must have almost depopulated all the northern parts of Arctogaea, destroying all the higher mammalian forms, except those which, like the Elephant and Rhinoceros, could adjust their coats to the altered conditions.
There is nothing, then, in what is known of the older Eocene mammals of the Arctogaeal province to forbid the supposition that they stood in an ancestral relation to those of the Calcaire Grossier and the Gypsum of the Paris basin, and that our present fauna, therefore, is directly derived from that which already existed in Arctogaea at the commencement of the Tertiary period.
The fact that this immense fauna of Miocene Arctogaea is now fully and richly represented only in India and in South Africa, while it is shrunk and depauperized in North Asia, Europe, and North America, becomes at once intelligible, if we suppose that India and South Africa had but a scanty mammalian population before the Miocene immigration, while the conditions were highly favourable to the new comers.
In fact the Miocene mammalian fauna of Europe and the Himalayan regions contains, associated together, the types which are at present separately located in the South-African and Indian sub-provinces of Arctogaea.
In fact the Miocene mammalian fauna of Europe and the Himalayan regions contains, associated together, the types which are at present separately located in the South-African and Indian sub-provinces of Arctogaea.
Whether this connection took place by the east, or by the west, or by both sides of the Old World, there is at present no certain evidence, and the question is immaterial to the present argument; but, as there are good grounds for the belief that the Australian province and the Indian and South-African sub-provinces were separated by sea from the rest of Arctogaea before the Miocene epoch, so it has been rendered no less probable, by the investigations of Mr.
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