In the Miocene epoch many of these more ancient quadrupeds no longer appear upon the scene, while others still flourish in its upper period along with still existing genera, and with forms long since extinct, such as the Dinotherium. This huge animal is particularly remarkable for its two large and heavy tusks, placed at the extremity of the lower jaw, and curved downwards like those in the upper jaw of the walrus. It was formerly supposed to be an herbivorous cretacean, and to have used its anterior limbs principally in the act of digging for roots. The remains on which these speculations were founded were the huge jaws and shoulder-blade discovered at Epplesheim in Hesse Darmstadt; but an immense pelvis of the animal, measuring six feet in breadth and four and a quarter feet in height, discovered by Father Sanno Solaro, in the department of the Haute Garonne, proves that this supposed aquatic pachyderm was a gigantic marsupial, and that the dependent trunks of the unwieldy animal, instead of serving the purpose of anchoring it to the banks of rivers, answered the more homely, but equally important office, of lifting the young into the maternal pouch. ‘The remarkable history of the successive discovery of its bones,’ says Professor Haughton, ‘and the change of views consequent thereupon, should teach geologists modesty in the expression of their opinion.’ During this period also flourished in India, along with many other strange forms of life, the Colossochelys Atlas, a tortoise of the most gigantic proportions, measuring, probably, nearly twenty feet on the curve of the carapace, and dwarfing into insignificance the great Indian tortoise of the present day. The nearer we approach our own times, the greater becomes the proportion of still existing genera and species; and it is remarkable that as early as the Pliocene epoch we find a geographical distribution of mammalian life analogous to that which now characterises the various regions of the earth. Thus the fossil monkeys of South America have the nostrils wide apart like all the existing simiæ of the new world, and fossil monkeys with approximated nostrils, the characteristic mark of all the old world quadrumana, are exclusively found in Asia and in Europe, where now a small species of monkey is confined to the Rock of Gibraltar, but where, in the Upper Miocene times, large long-armed apes, equalling man in stature, lived in the oak forests of France. Thus also South America, where alone sloths and armadilloes exist at the present day, is the only part of the world where, in the younger tertiary rocks, the remains of analogous mammals—the Megatherium, the Mylodon, and the Glyptodon—have been found.