MARSUPIAL RHINOCEROS.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 46, Issue 14129, 29 May 1920, Page 3

MARSUPIAL RHINOCEROS.

THE SMITHSON DISCOVERY.

; The giant marsupial recently found I at Smithton turns out to be a rhinoceros, and the curators of the northern and southern museums have communi- ' cated a note to the Royal Society by ; W ay of putting the discovery upon record. In their short note they explain, in part, why the mystery of these giants has puzzled scientific men sinee the year 1844. It must not be imagined for a moment, that this rhinoceros has , anything to do with the living rhinoceroses of South, Africa, America, and the Indo-Malay regions. It was a straight-out marsupial animal, with a pouch (supported by pouch bones) in which to carry its young. The discovery necessitates a complete revision of all the animals called “notothoria” and their allies, and until the whole of the anatomy of the new find has been fuily worked out. the authors call a halt. The note by Messrs H. H. Scott and Clive E. Lord is as follows: The discovery at Smithton during the present year of a nearly complete (skeleton of Notothepiuin Yutchelli forms the occasion for a revision of many of our ideals respecting these remarkable marsupial animals, since the fragmentary remains hitherto _ available for study have failed to yield the sequence of evidence we now possess. This is a note only—intended to place upon record tho fact that tho Notot orium mitchelli was an extinct marsupial rhinoceros, and that tho four genera, Nototherium, Zygomaturus, Euouema, and Sthenomerus, with their several species, are accordingly undor revision —and will later on be dealt with in detail. The enormous mass of material to be passed in review forbids anything like speculation at present, but it is within the mark to observe that that two groups of these animals have been instinctively felt (by all workers) to have existed, quite irrespective the sex questions—one a platyrhinean the other a litifrons type, and that now appears that they were also a horned and hornless group, and that Lotothorium mitchelli- belonged to the fo mer ,or cerathine group, and that some other species constituted the aceratlnne group, in which the weapons were reduced to very small things, or actual > missing. Wo are fully alive to the fact that tho sex question come strongly to the front here, and we hope to fully deal with the whole question later on ‘ The true rhinoceroses and tapirs had generalised ancestors that brought these two families exceedingly close together, and so closely did they stimulate each other that the teeth alone served to distinguish them. The Netothcria had tapir-like teeth and, as P o fessor Owen demonstrated, as far back as 1872 the nasal structure recalled the anatomy of tho Tichorhine rhinoceros, but. with the imperfect material Owen had to work upon he was unable to sav, as we can to-day, that Nototherium mitchelli was a marsupial rhinoceros, and not. a marsupial tapir-like animal, as hitherto supposed. The fortunate discovery of remains nf the Tichorhine rhinoceros embedded in the ice, enabled palaeontologists to speak with absolute -certainty as to the nature of the animal’s horn, but the absence of such an event in our case leaves grounds for conjecture as to structure and shape, to which set o cn cumstances we must add the tact that the marsupials, as a group, are well removed from the ancestral rhinoceros tvpe, and accordingly the complex factors of “parallel evolution” have to be contended with. At present all that can be said is that we have an animal with a skull built for aggressive warfare with specially constructed cervical vertebrae—powerful and shock-re-sisting—nasal regions akin -to those of the Tichorhine rhinoceros, plus a curious nasal cartilege point (practically unique), which is evidently a development, essentioal to the remouldi»<r of the marsupial skull, to the special needs of the -ease. All the.se structures will in due course be dealt with, but at present can only be glanced at. Evidence of the titanic battles .that this animal engaged in are to be found in the complete smashing and pa/tial mending of the collar-bone, tho crushing of the maxills-nasal region, and its subsequent repair. The whole scries of structures that in Nototherium tasmanicum could have served no greater purpose than a moderate resistance of force are here, in Nototkeriuni mitchelli, built- up to the strength essential tothe conducting of the fiercest aggressive warfare; and the conclusion seems inevitable that the marsupial order, in ages past, evolved a fighting group of rhiuoccros-like animals, of which the giant, Nototherium mitchelli, was one. The palaeontologist do Vis worked hard to show that Zygomaturus was a rave animal in its day, and made many departures from tiie typical Notothciia, thus feeling his way through fragmentary evidence to a segregation of the two groups cited above. Professor Owen never saw the skull called Zygomaturus, but claimed a cast of it, as a replica of the skull that should have been associated with the type jaws of his genus Nototlicrium. We hold a very exact copy of Professor Owen’s cast, and have checked it with his description and measurements, and found it to agree in toto, but the real skull, that has come to us, is more powerful in the essential parts, and accentuates the rhinoceros habits in a most marked degree. In working over the cast, with Professor Owen’s descriptive text as a guide, the master mind of the great comparative anatomist stands boldly out and the pity is that Owen is not here to deal with this splendid find from the Tasmanian pleistocene formations. This latest addition to our knowledge shows that the ccrathine Nototheria were much larger than the genus were suspected of producing, and we quite expect to find Huxley’s Diprotodoii minor thus accounted for, not so much for its original description ns for its later acceptance by others, who, finding Nototherian remains relating to the appendicular skeleton, naturally relegated them to Diprotodon minor,’ but this question we shall deal with very fully later. (Smithton is in North-West Tasmania.)