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Updated: June 11, 2025
The paca and agouti belong to the peculiar family of the rodent order confined to South America, and which connects the Rodentia to the Pachydermata the order to which the elephant, horse, and hog belong. The fossil toxodon resembled the Rodentia in its dentition, and, at the same time, was nearly related to the elephant.
Even the comparatively scanty Eocene fauna yields examples of the orders Cheiroptera, Insectivora, Rodentia, and Perissodactyla; of Artiodactyla under both the Ruminant and the Porcine modifications; of Carnivora, Cetacea, and Marsupialia.
Moreover, I could perceive that they were armed with the cutting teeth, which distinguish the family of the rodentia, or `gnawers. These teeth I could see distinctly as some of the animals were using them at the time, and they even protruded when their mouths were shut. I noticed that there was a pair of them in each jaw, broad, strong, and shaped like chisels.
The zoologist classifies them under many heads. The field mouse and rabbits are rodentia, the deer ungulata, the kangaroos marsupialia. In my museum they are all one family, and their labels are their ears. In these days of international conferences, parliaments of religion, pan-everything-in-turn councils, might we not arrange for a great catholic congress of distinguished ears?
Horses and cattle, sheep, and goats and pigs resemble one another in many respects besides their hoofs, and they form one natural order; the well-developed gnawing teeth of rats and rabbits and squirrels place these forms together in the order rodentia; the structures adapting their possessors for a flesh-eating and predatory life unite the tribes of the lion, wolf, bear, and seal, in the order carnivora.
This struck me profoundly, especially the difference of the species in the adjoining islets in the Galapagos Archipelago. Thirdly, the relation of the living Edentata and Rodentia to the extinct species. I shall never forget my astonishment when I dug out a gigantic piece of armour like that of the living armadillo.
The same moral is inculcated by the study of every other order of Tertiary monodelphous Mammalia. Each of these orders is represented in the Miocene epoch: the Eocene formation, as I have already said, contains Cheiroptera, Insectivora, Rodentia, Ungulata, Carnivora, and Cetacea.
A peculiar formation of the incisors, or front teeth, groups a number of smaller animals together under the name of Rodentia, from the Latin word rodens, which signifies gnawing. These teeth act as files, so that the food on which their owners principally live is reduced by friction to a state which fits it for digestion.
It is better suited to a sterile country like Patagonia than to the grassy humid plain; nevertheless it was found throughout the whole of the pampas; but in a country where the wisdom of a Sir William Harcourt was never needed to slip the leash, this king of the Rodentia is now nearly extinct.
Of cetacea, or whale-like mammals, sixty-five; ruminantia, or cud-chewers, one hundred and seventy-seven; pachydermata, or thick-skinned mammals, such as the horse, hog, and elephant, forty-one; edentata, like the sloth and ant-eater, thirty-five; rodentia, or gnawers, such as the rat, squirrel, and beaver, six hundred and seventeen; carnivora, or flesh-eaters, four hundred and forty-six; cheiroptera, or bats, three hundred and twenty-eight; quadrumana, or monkeys, two hundred and twenty-one; and marsupialia, or pouched mammals, like the opossum and kangaroo, one hundred and thirty-seven.
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