their small size enabling them to be accommodated in the jaw together. The skull of Dinotherium is lower than that of Elephas or Mastodon. The bones of the skeleton generally are like those of Elephas.
Though a suggestion of marsupial bones attached to the pelvis has been discredited, there is no doubt that Dinotherium occupies the most primitive position among the Proboscidea; but at the same time it cannot be regarded as the ancestor of Elephants, as it is so much specialised in various ways. The incisors for one thing forbid this way of looking at the creature. It is an ancient genus found in beds of Miocene age in Europe and Asia. It is not known from America. The creature was larger than any Elephant. Eighteen feet in length has been assigned to it. The enormous weight of the lower jaw and tusks seems to argue that it was at least partially aquatic in habit, and that it may have used these tusks for grubbing up aquatic roots or for mooring itself to the bank. At first there were naturalists who considered it as an ally of the Manatee, and the skull is not unsuggestive of that of the Sirenia.
Pyrotherium has been referred to the Proboscidea; but our knowledge of that form is limited to a few teeth from Patagonian rocks of an uncertain age.[1] They are simple bilophodont molars, very like those of Dinotherium. A tusk has been found in the neighbourhood of these teeth which may possibly belong to the same animal; but it is uncertain.
Sub-Order 7. HYRACOIDEA.
This group of small mammals contains only one well-marked genus which is usually named Hyrax, although Procavia seems to be the accurate term. Popularly these creatures are known as Coneys. They have a singular resemblance to Rodents, the short ears and much reduced tail, besides the squatting attitude adopted, contributing to this merely skin-deep likeness. They agree with other Ungulates in the structure of the molar teeth, which are much like those of Rhinoceros; in the absence of a clavicle; in the absence of an acromion; in the reduction of the digits of the limbs to four digits in the manus and three in the pes. On the
- ↑ Lydekker, An. Mus. La Plata, Pal. Arg. iii. 1894.
