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Updated: May 24, 2025
The Placentals are also generally without the hook-shaped process at the angle of the lower jaw which is found in the Marsupials. However, the feature that characterises the Placentals above all others, and that has given its name to the whole sub-class, is the formation of the placenta.
New Zealand must have been visited to obtain its wingless birds; Mauritius for its dodo, then living; Australia for its marsupials and other peculiar animals; and every large island, and most of the small ones, to obtain those forms of life that are only to be found in each.
The passage from the seal to the whale through the walrus and the sea-cow is an easy and natural one, the two latter being obviously the connecting links; and in spite of certain diversities of food, they form in reality one family-party, as do the marsupials. But it is too late in the day to talk of this, my dear child, and you and I cannot pretend to alter what is taught in the schools.
In this new structure they would have no preponderant advantage as long as the genial Jurassic age favoured the great reptiles, and they may have remained as small and insignificant as the Marsupials.
This second sub-class of the Mammals is very interesting as a perfect intermediate stage between the other two. While the Marsupials retain a great part of the characteristics of the Monotremes, they have also acquired some of the chief features of the Placentals.
I am informed by Mr. Gould that this holds good in a marked manner with the marsupials of Australia, the males of which appear to continue growing until an unusually late age. See the very interesting paper by Mr. J.A. Allen in 'Bull. Mus. Comp. Zoology of Cambridge, United States, vol. ii. No. 1, p. 82. The weights were ascertained by a careful observer, Capt. Bryant. Dr.
On the Succession of the same Types within the same areas, during the later tertiary periods. Mr. Clift many years ago showed that the fossil mammals from the Australian caves were closely allied to the living marsupials of that continent.
The characteristic feature of this family of creatures is the possession of an external pouch in the female, in which the young are kept and nourished until they can take care of themselves as the young of other animals are able to do. The young of the Marsupials are brought forth, or born, in an imperfect condition, and undeveloped in size and strength.
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.
Australia, in fact, stands alone: it possesses no apes or monkeys, no cats or tigers, wolves, bears, or hyenas; no deer or antelopes, sheep or oxen; no elephant, horse, squirrel, or rabbit; none, in short, of those familiar types of quadruped which are met with in every other part of the world. Instead of these, it has Marsupials only: kangaroos and opossums; wombats and the duckbilled Platypus.
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