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On the one side we have baboons, lions, elephants, buffaloes, and giraffes; on the other spider-monkeys, pumas, tapirs, anteaters, and sloths; while among birds, the hornbills, turacos, orioles, and honeysuckers of Africa contrast strongly with the toucans, macaws, chatterers, and hummingbirds of America.
The assertion with regard to these orders is certainly true, but it should be borne in mind at the same time that the armadillos, which are much more abnormal than are the American anteaters as regards their dermal covering, in their dentition are less so. Again, the Dugong and Manatee are dermally alike, yet extremely different as regards the structure and number of their teeth.
The Eastern Continent had then, as now, its great pachyderms, elephants, rhinoceros, hippopotamus; South America, its armadillos, sloths, and anteaters; Australia, a crowd of marsupials; and the very strange birds of New Zealand had predecessors of similar strangeness.
A close-up shows a very comic little being, encased in a prickly, chestnut-colored armor, which should make him fearless in a den of a hundred anteaters. The front view of his head is a bit mephistophelian, for it is drawn upward into two horny spines; but the side view recalls a little girl with her hair brushed very tightly up and back from her face.
They are then barely distinguishable from the Condylarthra and Creodonta, and seem only recently to have issued from a common ancestor with those groups. In the course of the Tertiary we find them especially in South America, which was cut off from the North and its invading Carnivores during the Eocene and Miocene developed into large sloths, armadilloes, and anteaters.
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