Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/60

32 been the ancestors of the horse. They were about the size of Shetland ponies, and possessed three distinct hoofs on each foot, reaching to the ground. The forests also sheltered numerous hog-like animals, such as the Chœropotamus, intermediate between the swine and the hippopotamus, and the Microchœrus and Hyopotamus. Generalised, or rather, as they may with more justice be termed, ancestral forms of the deer and antelopes, hornless and without antlers (Anoplotherium, Dichodon, Dichobune) browsed on the luxuriant herbage in the glades. Overhead on the trees there were opossums, while in the undergrowth lurked the Theridomys, a creature allied to the small spiny rats (Echimys) of Brazil. There were also beasts of prey, one the Hyœnodon, or precursor of the hyæna, a carnivore, which to the ordinary characters of a placental mammal united the marsupial attribute of three sectorial molars in each jaw, arranged as in the marsupial Thylacinus or Tasmanian wolf, which it rivalled in size.

The same group of animals lived on the borders of the lake occupying the site of Paris in the upper Eocene times, and the species associated with them enable us to complete our picture. There were small deer-like animals, the Kainothere and the Amphitragulus, closely allied in size and form to the musk-deer, as well as the Xiphodon (Fig. 5), in elegance rivalling the gazelle. Among the carnivores were creatures resembling wolves (Cynodon), foxes (Amphicyon), wolverines (Tylodon), and hyænas and civets (Proviverra), all with characters like the Hyœnodon, now only found among the Marsupials.