The Winners in Life’s Race; or, The Great Backboned Family

These are all vegetable-feeders; and they leave plenty of room for the little insect-feeders, the Myrmecobius, with its long bushy tail, and the Bandicoots or rabbit-rats, which feed partly on bulbs and roots,

Footnote 116. Hypsiprymnus penicillatus.

Footnote 117. Dendrolagus.

and more often on insects, grubs, and even small mice and vermin.

But where are the animal-eaters? Surely here, as in other parts of the world, some of the group have taken to feeding on their neighbours? There are very few carnivorous animals in Australia, and these are small, though fierce, and feed chiefly on rats and mice; yet the bones of huge marsupials, with long pointed teeth, found in the rocks, tell us that dangerous animals were once there before they were driven out, probably by the Dingo and savage man. And when we get to Tasmania, where no Dingos are found, there the flesh-eating marsupials still live, as fierce as any wolves and wild cats of Europe, and still they are pouch-bearers. Slim and elegant as the fierce and furry Tiger-wolf (Fig. 52) looks as he courses over the Tasmanian plains in search of prey, yet the mother carries her young in a pouch like the gentler wombat or the powerful kangaroo; and so does the mother of the Native Devil or Tiger-cat (Fig. 52), which is so fierce that even the natives are afraid of it when it turns at bay, and it will attack and devour large sheep, though it is only the size of a terrier dog.

We see, then, that the marsupials in a world of their own, cut off by the sea from the struggling world beyond, play all parts in life; and squirrels, monkeys, insect-eaters, gnawing animals, hoofed animals, and beasts of prey, all have their parallel among the pouch-bearers. But just because they are so isolated it becomes a curious question why, when we travel right across the wide Atlantic or Pacific to America, we find another set of pouched animals slightly different but belonging to the same group. How comes it that the clever little opossums of Guiana, Brazil, and Virginia (see Fig. 53, p. 200), which grasp the trees with the free nailless great toe of their hind feet and hang by their long tails, should be marsupials, carrying their little ones in pouches, when all their relations are thousands of miles away over the sea?

Fig. 52.

Tasmanian Marsupials.

The two to the left of the picture are Wombats;[118] the front right hand figure the Tasmanian Devil;[119] and the background figure the Tasmanian Wolf.[120]

Stop a moment, and let us go back to those times when the marsupials were living with the great flying reptiles in Europe and North America. These forms

Footnote 118. Phascolomys.

Footnote 119. Dasyurus.

Footnote 120. Thylacinus.

(see p. 183) were like the little myrmecobius now living in Australia, and at some period, we do not know exactly when, their descendants must have found their way to that part of the world, where they have since branched out into so many curious forms, gnawing, leaping, running, and flying, and filling the place of ordinary quadrupeds. But they must also have lived on in the Northern Hemisphere and branched out into other forms; for much later, when tigers and other ferocious beasts had begun to prowl about in the forests of Europe and America, opossums were leaping in the trees, as we know by finding their bones in Suffolk, under Paris, and in North America. And so we see that when these opossums found their way down south to Brazil and Guiana, the simile that we used a little while ago (p. 131) probably became literally true, and the Australian and South American pouched animals are related to each other, not because they come one from the other, but because they both come from the same very ancient stock which once lived in Europe.

This would explain how these active, furry, little beings of all sizes, from that of a good-sized cat to a rat, come to be sporting among the leaves of the grand forests of Brazil or on the edges of the Virginian swamps, sleeping during the day in the hollow trees, and prowling by night over the plantations, and among the rice-fields feeding on fruit and seeds, worms and insects, and even on young birds and rats. On the ground they walk heavily, with flat feet, but in the trees they swing from bough to bough (see Fig. 53), the little ones curling their tails round that of their mother and clinging to her back as she goes. Some of these opossums have even lost the pouch, and put their little ones at once on to the thick fur of their back as soon as they come out of their snug nests in the tree-hollows. They seem to have a happy time of it, these merry tree-climbers, and know well how to swing out of danger, or to feign death if they cannot escape, so that “cute as a ’possum” is a common American proverb. One kind, living in the swamps of Guiana, feeds almost entirely on crabs, while another, called the Yapock, has webbed feet and dives under water, feeding on fish and other water-animals.

But here another question presents itself. How is it that these curious pouched animals have lived on in America as well as in Australia when they have been killed off in Europe and Asia? The answer to this is not far to seek if we remember that geology teaches us that there have been many changes of land and sea in past times, for the neck of land which joins South America to North America is very low and narrow, and a change of level of scarcely more than 2000 feet would break it up into islands; and as we know that such changes have taken place in past geological times, there is no doubt that once this neck was partially under the sea, and South America, like Australia, was a huge continental island, where the lower animals might struggle on and become settled, before the higher ones poured in to interfere with them.

* * * * *

Indeed, if the opossums did not teach us this history, we might learn it from another singularly old-fashioned race of animals; for in the same Brazilian forests in which our little opossums are sporting, the dreamy Sloth, with his long arms, short legs with the knees bent outwards, and long thick hair drooping over his eyes, is hanging back downwards from the boughs; while the strange Ant-bear is tearing open the ant-hills with his strong bent claws in the damp earth below, and licking up the insects with his long sticky tongue; and the Armadillo, whose back is covered with bony shields like the crocodile, issues out of his burrow at night to dig for worms or roots or buried animals. We may look all the world over

and we shall not find another group so strange and old-fashioned as this one, nor even any creatures of their kind, except the ant-eaters of the Cape and the scaly Manises of Africa and India, which also live, as you will notice, upon continents which jut out into the water, and not on the great northern mass of land.

Fig. 53.

South American pouched animal, the Opossum;[121] and imperfect-toothed animals—Sloth,[122] Ant-bear,[123] and Armadillo.[124]

In many ways these curious animals (Edentata) of South America and Africa are more singular, though not of so ancient a race, as the “pouch-bearers.” Many of them, the American ant-bears and the African Pangolins, are quite toothless, and those which like the sloth have teeth, have very imperfect ones more like the teeth of reptiles than those of marsupials; again, their feet have the toes much joined together, and the sloths have only three toes on the hind feet and sometimes two only on the front, and the joints of their neck are irregular in number. Thus we see in them that variability of structure which always points to a low order of animals; and, moreover, the armadilloes are the only milk-giving animals which are covered with bony plates like reptiles.

Fig. 54.

African imperfect-toothed animals—Aard-Vark or Cape Ant-eater in the background, and scaly Manis or Pangolin in the foreground.

What, then, is the history of these old-fashioned animals? Much the same as that of the marsupials, so far as we can read it; for at the same time that opossums were living in Europe, strange animals, with imperfect rootless teeth, and toes with immense claws, bent inwards like the claws of the ant-eaters, were wandering over France and Greece, where we now find their bones. Then, a little later we find, on the shores of the Pacific in North America, other huge imperfect-toothed creatures, which lived, died, and were buried in the mud; and lastly, in

Footnote 121. Didelphis.

Footnote 122. Cholœpus.

Footnote 123. Mymecophaga.

Footnote 124. Dasypus.

South America, still later, we find whole skeletons of gigantic sloth-like animals the size of elephants,[125] which had not yet such long arms as the Sloth of to-day, but walked on four feet upon the ground and browsed upon the trees, while huge armadillo-like creatures,[126] with solid bony shields covering their backs, wandered in the vast forests and lived on animal food. Making use of these facts, then, cannot we picture to ourselves how these large unwieldy creatures, with their stiff bent claws and their weakly teeth, which if once broken or lost could not be replaced by a second set, were no match for the

Footnote 125. Megatherium.

Footnote 126. Glyptodon.

large tigers, bears, and other beasts of prey which were roaming over Europe and Asia; while those, on the contrary, which found their way from North to South America, and were cut off from the crowded world, just as the marsupials were, might live on and fill the land with large creepers and burrowers. In the old world the same would probably happen in Africa, where the sea certainly flowed at one time over the low-lying desert of Sahara; and so the Cape Ant-eater and the Pangolin, both so different from their American relations, would keep their place in the world.

This would explain how they gained a firm footing; but the next question is how they kept it, when jaguars and pumas began to roam over America, and lions and panthers over Africa? Now, if we inquire into the history of the Aard-Vark or great Cape ant-eater, which is in many ways much more like the American armadilloes,—for he has like them teeth in the back of his mouth, and walks flat-footed, though he has a thick skin and bristles instead of armour,—we find that he is a very timid animal, and lives almost entirely underground, only venturing out at night to scratch open the ant-hills with his strong claws, so that he may thrust his long sticky tongue into the ant-galleries to draw it back covered with food. Even then he never ventures far from his hole, so we can easily conjecture that it is by concealment that he has escaped destruction.

Still more would the Pangolins flourish, for though they are toothless and walk very clumsily, because their front feet are bent under so that they tread on the upper part, yet they have two means of protection.

First, like the ant-eater, they live chiefly underground and come out at night; and secondly, their back is covered with sharp-edged scales, which grow from the skin as hairs do, and can be raised into a complete cheval-de-frise as they roll themselves up, or tuck their tail and head between their legs when they are attacked. Thus protected, the scaly ant-eaters not only flourish in Africa, but have even kept their ground in India, China, and Ceylon.