Except for the modification of the skull which is conditioned by the development of the proboscis, the skeleton might belong to any one of several Eocene or Oligocene families, and it is this generalized, indifferent character which has led to the dubbing of many early perissodactyls as “tapiroids.” The limbs are short and moderately heavy, the bones of the fore-arm and lower leg all separate and the number of toes is four in the front foot and three in the hind. The toes end in well-formed separate hoofs, but behind them is a pad, which carries most of the weight. The body is covered with smooth, short hair, which in the American species is of a uniform dark brown, but in the Asiatic species the head, neck and limbs are black and the body is white. In both, however, the young have longitudinal, light-coloured stripes and spots on a dark ground (_see_ Fig. 6, p. 47) indicating what the colour-pattern of the ancestral forms must have been. As might be inferred with certainty from the low-crowned teeth, the tapirs are browsing, not grazing, animals, feeding upon leaves and shoots and other soft vegetable tissues. They are shy and solitary in habit and live usually in thick forests and near water, which they frequently enter, both for bathing and as a place of refuge when pursued. Under modern conditions, the only perissodactyls of the western hemisphere are the tapirs of the Neotropical region, North America proper, which for ages was the principal home of the order, not having a single representative now. In the Pleistocene, tapirs were apparently more abundant than in any of the Tertiary epochs, but this was probably due to the fact that the Pleistocene of the forested regions is far more fully recorded than is any Tertiary stage. One species, which was hardly distinguishable from the Recent Central American form, was common in the forested region east of the Mississippi and in California, and a second species (_Tapirus †haysii_) was larger and heavier than the other. Except in Texas, none have been found in the Great Plains area, nor are they likely to be, for that region, then as now, appears to have been devoid of forests. No doubt, these Pleistocene species had substantially the same habits as the existing ones, but they were adapted to a colder climate and a different vegetation, for, except the Pinchaque Tapir (_T. roulini_) of the high Andes, all the modern species are tropical in distribution.