"MARSUPISTRALIA"

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 5, 6 July 1921, Page 10

"MARSUPISTRALIA"

THE STRANGE ANnkALS OF

AUSTRALIA,

(FMM BGK »WJI CORMiretiMHT.)

SYDNEY, 22nd Jpne.

When a man stepped off the San Francisco mail steamer the. other day and said that ho had como from New York ■Lo study the strange animals and zoological curiosities, everyone thought he was simply another foreign critic trying to he nasty afc-ihe expense of the Australian politicians. But he turned out to be T>r. W K. Gregory, curator of comparative anatomy in the New York Museum of Natural History, and he was quite genuinely interested in our fauna. He told Australians right away a good deal about their animals that they did nob know tlieniselvea. ■■ ■ '

Australian birds and animals, he said, were unique. Australia was a great natural-history museum, , and was the Mecca of zoology students.; It. had- the greatest variety of animals in the utmost variety of forms. It had the Tasmanian wolf, the wombat, the kangaroo^ the native bear, tree kangaroos, and the pouched mole. Although these animals were widely different in appearance and habits, they were all built on the same structural plan. That was the marsupial plan—the plan of the pouched animals.' In anatomy they were closely allied. That was because all these animals evolved, separately from the rest of the world, during the countless ages since Australia and New Guinea were cut off from vthe rest of the world. • Australia . and New G-uinea formed a continent'! apart throujrh endless ages, and went on developing these strange forms. '

Then, in more recent times, came mail. The black man came first of all. In time, as we measure it, it is very long since the blacks came, but it was recently when compared with the period since Australia became isolated. The blacks brought the dingo, which definitely belonged' to the dog family of the Northern Hemisphere. Then, in our own time, came the white man, bringing the rabbit, the fox, and the" rat, all belonging to the Northern Hemisphere. These newcomers were crowding out the oldtime animals. The presence of the dingo suesrested that the blacks originally came to Australia from the Northern Hemisphere.

This scientist does not expect to discover anything new in Australian' fauna —that, he says, has all been done by a, line of eminent workers, from Huxley to Sir Baldwin Spencer and Dr. E. C. Stirling. But they wanted to go over the ground again, because the native fauna of Australia was diminishing at an alarminsr rate. The ra-bbit was eating the native animals out of house and. home, while the white people were very destructive. He had aeon as many as half a million Australian mammal skips sold at one sale in St. Louie.

" The evolution of the Aiistralian marsupial." concluded the young scientist, "is one of the most interesting topics in zoology."