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Updated: May 29, 2025
Many trails led through the woods, and especially along the borders of the swamp; and, although their principal makers had evidently been cattle, yet there were in them footprints of both tapir and deer. The tapir makes a footprint much like that of a small rhinoceros, being one of the odd-toed ungulates. We could hear the dogs now and then, evidently scattered and running on various trails.
We saw that the primitive herbivores divided early in the Eocene into the "odd-toed" and "even-toed" varieties; the name refers, it will be remembered, not to the number of toes, but to the axis of stress. The Artiodactyl group must have quickly branched in turn, as we find very primitive hogs and camels before the end of the Eocene.
It is true that the elephants are generally considered to form a group apart from both the odd and the even-toed Ungulata. But of the two, their affinities with the odd-toed division are more marked.
When the hoofed animals of modern times were reviewed as subjects for comparative anatomical study, the odd-toed forms arranged themselves in a series beginning with an animal like an elephant with the full number of five digits on each foot and ending at the opposite extreme with the horse.
The Condylarthra seem to have gone out of existence before the time of the middle Eocene, but before this they had become separated into the two great divisions of odd-toed and even-toed ungulates, into which all truly hoofed beasts now living fall.
Among the even-toed forms the hippopotamus has four which reach the ground, with a vestige of a fifth, so this animal has apparently descended from a typical mammal with the full number along a different line from that taken by the odd-toed forms.
The Ungulata or hoofed quadrupeds are now divided into the even-toed or odd-toed divisions; but the Macrauchenia of South America connects to a certain extent these two grand divisions. No one will deny that the Hipparion is intermediate between the existing horse and certain other ungulate forms.
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