Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 12, 2025
What a crashing change from lounging in St James's street to sauntering on Boulogne pier; or, after dining at Brookes and supping at Crockford's, to be saved from destruction by the friendly interposition that sends you in an official capacity to the marsupial sympathies of Sydney or Swan River!
If this were the case, the existence of cassowaries and of marsupial quadrupeds, both in New Guinea and in Australia, becomes intelligible; while the difference between the littoral molluscs of the north and the south shores of Torres Straits is readily explained by the great probability that, when the depression in question took place, and what was, at first, an arm of the sea became converted into a strait separating Australia from New Guinea, the northern shore of this new sea became tenanted with marine animals from the north, while the southern shore was peopled by immigrants from the already existing marine Australian fauna.
As most of the Placentals have not this process, we can, with some probability, recognise the Marsupial from this feature alone. Most of the mammal remains that we have from the Jurassic and Cretaceous deposits are merely lower jaws, and most of the jaws found in the Jurassic deposits at Stonesfield and Purbeck have the peculiar hook-like process that characterises the lower jaw of the Marsupial.
So rapidly does it burrow, that scarcely is one seen before its hind-quarters disappear in the sand. It likewise tries to escape notice by squatting down close to the ground. There are numerous species of opossum, most of them marsupial, in the Brazils, where they take the place of the shrews of Europe. They are very destructive to poultry. One of the species is aquatic, and has webbed feet.
No Australian type of Marsupial has been discovered in the Upper Eocene strata, nor any Edentate mammal.
With respect to the mammae of the higher animals, the most probable conjecture is that primordially the cutaneous glands over the whole surface of a marsupial sack secreted a nutritious fluid; and that these glands were improved in function through natural selection, and concentrated into a confined area, in which case they would have formed a mamma.
On either view we may suppose that the bizcacha has retained, by inheritance, more of the character of its ancient progenitor than have other Rodents; and therefore it will not be specially related to any one existing Marsupial, but indirectly to all or nearly all Marsupials, from having partially retained the character of their common progenitor, or of an early member of the group.
Although the Mesozoic era is shorter than the Paleozoic, as measured by the thickness of their strata, yet its duration must be reckoned in millions of years. Its predominant life features are the culmination and the beginning of the decline of reptiles, amphibians, cephalopod mollusks, and cycads, and the advent of marsupial mammals, birds, teleost fishes, and angiospermous plants.
Therefore we must suppose either that all Rodents, including the bizcacha, branched off from some very ancient Marsupial, which will have had a character in some degree intermediate with respect to all existing Marsupials; or that both Rodents and Marsupials branched off from a common progenitor, and that both groups have since undergone much modification in divergent directions.
The one is distinctly a true squirrel, a rodent of the rodents, externally adapted to an arboreal existence; the other is equally a true phalanger, a marsupial of the marsupials, which has independently undergone on his own account very much the same adaptation, for very much the same reasons.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking