the Margaret River district. During the execution of this task a large
mass or boss of stalagmitic material was encountered, which gave no little
trouble on amount of its compact nature and the great resistance it
offered to the tools of the workmen. The material was partly used to
construct a footway and partly thrown aside to be disposed of in the most
convenient manner, little notice having been taken of the many fragments
of bone that bristled from every piece of rock.

Mr. Le Souef, of the Zoological Gardens, having heard of the find,
proceeded to the spot and managed to secure numerous specimens, which he
had conveyed to Perth. He examined the fossil remains, and after assuring
himself of their scientific value handed them over to the Caves Board
officials, who in turn forwarded these cases of fossilised bones, etc., to
the Western Australian Museum. Some time afterwards Mr Le Souef sent to
the offices of the Board several other specimens which he had retained,
having identified them as portions of the lower jaw of an extinct
marsupial-sthenurus, thus making an interesting discovery which
unfortunately did not receive the publicity it deserved.

In December last the Board handed these few fragments to Mr. L. Glauert,
F.G.S., the palaeontologist to the Geological Survey of Western Australia,
who took the matter in hand. After the specimens had been freed from the
coating of stalagmite, etc., he examined them carefully, his
investigations and researches leading him to the conclusion that he was
not only dealing with the lower jaw of a long extinct cousin of the
kangaroos, which had not previously been recorded in this State, but
proving to him without a doubt that the form represented was one very
different from the various species previously known in the other States of
the Commonwealth. In order to mark its place of origin he, in his report
to the Board, suggested that it should bear the name of Sthenurus
occidentalis (the western sthenurus), and gave his grounds for considering
this a new form of the family.

To those who have heard and read of the extinct monsters of the other
continents—the mammoth and mastodon of Europe, the gigantic bird-reptiles
and dinosaurs of North America, the great sloths and armadillos of South
America, the sivatherium of Asia, and the huge moas of New Zealand, it
will not come as a surprise to learn that Australia, too, has its “dragons
of the prime.”

For nearly a century the huge diprotodon—a kangaroo with a head as large
as an elephant’s—was known to have existed in this southern continent ages
ago, for traces of it have been found in all the States, including Western
Australia.

The late Mr. E. T. Hardman, F.G.S., who did much excellent pioneering work
in the Kimberleys, came across bones of this extinct monster in the
Lennard River. Prospectors recovered a portion of a lower jaw (now in the
Western Australian Museum) near Lake Darlot, while the bones were so
common round about Balladonia that they were used as garden ornaments or
thrown away as utterly useless and uninteresting by the settlers in that
southern district. Slightly smaller in size was the nototherium, which
also had a general distribution throughout the continent.

Sthenurus cannot attempt to compare with either of these genera, but still
it was a tremendous animal when placed alongside even the great grey
kangaroo of to-day, which we all know, rivals a man in stature. [?] the
“old man” sthenurus was provided with long hind legs and a strong tail,
receiving his name “strong-tail” for that reason, but on the other hand
the bones which have been identified as being his show that, comparatively
speaking, his forelegs were longer than those of the national animal of
Australia. Like the kangaroo the sthenurus was a vegetable feeder, for his
teeth prove that he was not built to enjoy animal food. Even a casual
glance at his jaw would convince the merest tyro that the animal was used
to hard fare. The teeth are all of much greater size than those found in
the “great grey,” and bear traces of much rough usage and hard chewing, as
would be the case if the animal had to subsist upon nuts or the tougher
branches of trees and shrubs. The kangaroo, which feeds upon softer
herbage, has a slender jaw, and teeth which, through being continually
forced forward from behind, drop out, so that an old individual often has
only two cheek teeth on either side of his lower jaw in place of the
original five. With the sthenurus it was quite different. The large amount
of work which his teeth had to accomplish made it imperative that they
should all remain in his jaw to the very last, and so we find very few
examples of sthenurus jaws with fewer than the normal number of teeth,
excepting, of course, those cases where the teeth were broken or decayed.

The kangaroos, owing to the fact that the two halves of their lower jaw
are not fused together, are able to move the incisors with a kind of
scissor-like action, so that they can “eat very close.” Such a quality not
being necessary with sthenurus we nearly always find [that] [two] halves
united in the adult animal [and] often, too, in a younger example.

Very little else is known of this extinct marsupial, but it is considered
possible, and perhaps probable, that might be shed upon the subject if a
careful search were made in the Mammoth Cave, where all the factors are so
promising and all point to the chance of a rich store being unearthed if
the right locality be struck. That caves similar to the Mammoth Cave are
the store-rooms of fossil bones has been proved time after time, even in
this continent, as it is from such places that nearly all the recorded
specimens of sthenurus have been obtained.

In the early thirties of last century Sir Thos. Mitchell, in the course of
his travels, struck the first sthenurus bones in the Wellington Valley
Caves of N.S.W., whilst the Rev. J. E. Woods described the discovery of
similar bones in the Mount Bun Caves of South Australia some 30 years
later. Should a careful examination be undertaken in the Mammoth Cave it
is believed that the results will add fresh interest to those romantic
beauty spots which rival any in the southern continent, and which receive
all too little attention from tourists and the public at large.