The living Ornithostoma and the stem-forms of the Marsupials (or Didelphia) must be regarded as two widely diverging lines from the Promammals. This second sub-class of the Mammals is very interesting as a perfect intermediate stage between the other two. While the Marsupials retain a great part of the characteristics of the Monotremes, they have also acquired some of the chief features of the Placentals. Some features are also peculiar to the Marsupials, such as the construction of the male and female sexual organs and the form of the lower jaw. The Marsupials are distinguished by a peculiar hook-like bony process that bends from the corner of the lower jaw and points inwards. As most of the Placentals have not this process, we can, with some probability, recognise the Marsupial from this feature alone. Most of the mammal remains that we have from the Jurassic and Cretaceous deposits are merely lower jaws, and most of the jaws found in the Jurassic deposits at Stonesfield and Purbeck have the peculiar hook-like process that characterises the lower jaw of the Marsupial. On the strength of this paleontological fact, we may suppose that they belonged to Marsupials. Placentals do not seem to have existed at the middle of the Mesozoic age--not until towards its close (in the Cretaceous period). At all events, we have no fossil remains of indubitable Placentals from that period. The existing Marsupials, of which the plant-eating kangaroo and the carnivorous opossum (Figure 2.272) are the best known, differ a good deal in structure, shape, and size, and correspond in many respects to the various orders of Placentals. Most of them live in Australia, and a small part of the Australian and East Malayan islands. There is now not a single living Marsupial on the mainland of Europe, Asia, or Africa. It was very different during the Mesozoic and even during the Cenozoic age. The sedimentary deposits of these periods contain a great number and variety of marsupial remains, sometimes of a colossal size, in various parts of the earth, and even in Europe. We may infer from this that the existing Marsupials are the remnant of an extensive earlier group that was distributed all over the earth. It had to give way in the struggle for life to the more powerful Placentals during the Tertiary period. The survivors of the group were able to keep alive in Australia and South America because the one was completely separated from the other parts of the earth during the whole of the Tertiary period, and the other during the greater part of it. (FIGURE 2.271. Lower jaw of a Promammal (Dryolestes priscus), from the Jurassic of the Felsen strata. (From Marsh.))