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Updated: May 12, 2025
On the strength of this paleontological fact, we may suppose that they belonged to Marsupials. At all events, we have no fossil remains of indubitable Placentals from that period. Most of them live in Australia, and a small part of the Australian and East Malayan islands. There is now not a single living Marsupial on the mainland of Europe, Asia, or Africa.
It is admitted by most evolutionists that mammals are descended from a marsupial form; and if so, the mammary glands will have been at first developed within the marsupial sack. Lockwood, believes from what he has seen of the development of the young, that they are nourished by a secretion from the cutaneous glands of the sack.
Parts of the discarded gill-arches are gradually transformed into the three bones of the mammal's internal ear; just as other parts are converted into mouth cartilages, and as it is believed one of the gill clefts is converted into the Eustachian tube. In the Monotreme and Marsupial the ear-hole begins to be covered with a shell of cartilage; we have the beginning of the external ear.
It represents that epoch when animal life was first developed in the lowest order of quadrupeds. There are a few small exceptions, but it may be laid down as a general rule, that all the animals indigenous to this country are marsupial from the kangaroo, the largest down to the little field-mouse. The animals not indigenous are Man, the wild cattle, and the wild dogs.
I suppose, if I compare the young doctor to the young marsupial, I should also say that his protecting parental pouch, in which he acquires growth and vigor, is the hospital where he goes after graduation, or the practice which he sees under his preceptor's supervision.
In the end, Finn gave a cold bark of displeasure and trotted off into the gathering twilight, leaping the fence and plunging into the bush the moment he had passed the last house of the township. Half an hour later he killed a fat bandicoot, who was engaged at that moment in killing a tiny marsupial mouse.
The opossum, with its prehensile tail, marsupial pouch, and cunning ways, stands alone for its singularity among all the animals of the American continent. Many of the tribe are found in South America; but the Virginian opossum, the size of a full-grown cat, is larger than all its relatives. The head and body measure about twenty-two inches; and the tail, fifteen.
If the three localities in Europe where the most ancient mammalia have been found Purbeck, Stonesfield, and Stuttgart had belonged all of them to formations of the same age, we might well have imagined so limited an area to have been peopled exclusively with pouched quadrupeds, just as Australia now is, while other parts of the globe were inhabited by placentals; for Australia now supports one hundred and sixty species of marsupials, while the rest of the continents and islands are tenanted by about seventeen hundred species of mammalia, of which only forty-six are marsupial, namely, the opossums of North and South America.
The Lagorchestes is very common on the plains to the north of Gawler Town, but is so swift as generally to elude the dogs. It is marsupial, and about the size of a rabbit, but is greatly disproportioned, as all the Kangaroo tribe are, as regards the hind and fore quarters. In colour this animal is a silvery grey, crossed with dark coloured bars on the back. PHALANGISTA VULPINA. The Opossum.
If we want something distinctly human to be proud of, we may take the appendix, for man is the only animal that has this in its perfection. A somewhat similarly shriveled last four inches of the cæcum is found in the anthropoid apes and in the wombat, a burrowing marsupial of Australia.
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