Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/55

] of a peccari, and a form intermediate between that of the hog and the hyrax or coney. Both occur in the Woolwich and Reading series of the Table (p. 16), at Kyson in Suffolk. The Pliolophus of the London Clay is closely allied to the latter, while the Coryphodon from the same stratum resembled a tapir in its dentition and skeleton.

In the corresponding strata in France two beasts of prey of decided marsupial affinities are met with, the Arctocyon primævus, the most ancient of the Tertiary mammals of Europe, allied to the bears in the structure of its teeth, and to the marsupials in the low organisation of its brain, and the Palæonictis, with teeth resembling those of the Tasmanian dasyure, and in size rivalling the wolverine or glutton. The latter may very well be taken to be the type from which the family of Civets have been derived. The tapir-like Coryphodon also inhabited the lower Eocene land of France, Switzerland, and North America.

These animals constitute a small and insignificant fragment of a fauna, the ancestry of which is to be looked for in the Cretaceous age. They are of peculiar interest, because they show that at this time the carnivores were intermediate in character between the marsupials and the placental mammals.