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Updated: June 2, 2025
Generally, the thick forest comes down to the very water's edge; and there is no pathway except an occasional track followed by the chiguires, tapirs, and other animals; but, as these creatures only open the underwood to the height of their own bodies, all above that is a matted labyrinth of leaves and llanos, that form an impenetrable barrier to the passage of anything so tall as a man.
Besides, there was a path along its banks, not made by man, but evidently by large animals; whose tracks, seen here and there in soft places, showed them to be tapirs, wild-boars, and the larger but more rare rhinoceros. They saw none of these animals during their day's journey, though many of the traces were fresh.
They feed on all small mammals, birds, and reptiles, and even on some large ones; they kill iguanas; Cherrie saw a rattling chase through the trees, a coati following an iguana at full speed. We heard the rush of a couple of tapirs, as they broke away in the jungle in front of the dogs and headed, according to their custom, for the river; but we never saw them.
In South America, allowing 1200 pounds for the two tapirs together, 550 for the guanaco and vicuna, 500 for three deer, 300 for the capybara, peccari, and a monkey, we shall have an average of 250 pounds, which I believe is overstating the result. The ratio will therefore be as 6048 to 250, or 24 to 1, for the ten largest animals from the two continents.
The Coryphodon appears to have been allied to the Miocene and later Tapirs, while Pliolophus, in its skull and dentition, curiously partakes of both artiodactyle and perissodactyle characters; the third trochanter upon its femur, and its three-toed hind foot, however, appear definitely to fix its position in the latter division.
We lived well, with plenty of tapir beef, which was good, and venison of the bush deer, which was excellent; and as much ordinary beef as we wished, and fresh milk, too a rarity in this country. There were very few mosquitoes, and everything was as comfortable as possible. The tapir I killed was a big one. The remaining members of the party killed two or three more tapirs.
This was, in fact, the case, for the point was a favourite resting-place for the "chiguires," or "capivaras," on their passage to and from the water. There were tracks of tapirs, too, and peccaries, and many sorts of wading birds, that had been there while the mud was still soft.
We had been living some weeks in a government bungalow, fourteen miles from Singapore, across the island that looks out on the Straits of Malacca. The fishing and hunting were excellent. I had shot wild pig, deer, tapirs, and for some days had been getting ready to track down a tiger that had been prowling in the jungle about the bungalow.
If there had ever been a land connection between New Guinea and the Malay region, then, since Australian animals range into New Guinea, Malayan animals would have ranged into Australia, and we should find Victoria and New South Wales at the present day peopled by tapirs, orang-outangs, wild boars, deer, elephants, and squirrels, like those which now people Borneo, instead of, or side by side with, the kangaroos, wombats, and other marsupials, which, as we know, actually form the sole indigenous mammalian population of Greater Britain beneath the Southern Cross.
Another developed along a line parallel to that of the horse, and herds of these light-limbed and swift-footed running rhinoceroses ranged the Great Plains from the Dakotas southward. The tapirs are an ancient family which has changed but little since it separated from the other perissodactyl stocks in the early Tertiary.
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