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Show 544 MR. O.THOMAS ON LAGORCHESTES FASCIATUS. [Dec. 7, 7. On the Wallaby commonly known as Lagorchestes fasciatus. By OLDFIELD THOMAS, Natural History Museum. [Received November 3, 1886.] (Plate LIX.) One of the earliest known of all the Australian Marsupials was the beautiful little banded Wallaby which was discovered in 1804 on the islands in Shark's Bay, Western Australia, by Peron and Lesueur, during their famous voyage round the world, and described by them in 1807 under the name of " Kangurus fascial us"1. This species was included by all the earlier writers, with the rest of the Macropodidce, in the single genus then recognized, whether called Kangurus, Macropus, or Halmaturus. In 1842, however, it was placed by Gould, on the authority of the typical specimens in the Paris Museum, in Gray's genus Bettongia, although in the same year he described two other specimens of it as " Lagorchestes albipilis," thus referring them to the genus made by him just previously for the true Hare-wallabies, of which Lagorchestes leporoides is the type. Gould's two mistakes in referring Peron and Lesueur's species to tbe Hypsiprymnine genus Bettongia, and in separating " L. albipilis " from it, were corrected by Waterhouse in his excellent general work on the Marsupials, where the species was described 2 under the name of Macropus (Lagorchestes) fasciatus3-an identification accepted by Gould in his ' Mammals of Australia,' where the species is figured as Lagorchestes fasciatus, by which name it has since been generally known. The teeth, as well as the external characters, of L. fasciatus were described and figured by Waterhouse, and their differences from those of the true Hare-wallabies noted ; but he does not seem to have at all appreciated the importance of these differences, which appear to me to be so great as to compel me, 80 years after the first description of the species, to form a new and special genus for its reception. This genus I propose to call Lagostrophus*. The differences in dentition between Lagorchestes and Lagostro-phus are not of the trivial and unimportant nature of those characteristic of most of the other genera of this very homogeneous family, but are of a kind to show that Lagostrophus fasciatus must have not only different food, but even a different manner of eating it to any of the other members of the subfamily Macropodince. On examining the incisors ot any of the ordinary Kangaroos and Wallabies (Plate LIX. figs. 8, 9, and 12), we find that the whole set form a widely open curve, and that the sizes and proportions of the 1 Voy. Terres Austr. i. p. 114, Atl. pi. xxvii. 2 Vol. i. p. 87 (1846). 3 Nat. Hist. M a m m . i. p. 87 (1846). 4 Xoyius, a Hare, and vrpotyos, a band or belt. |
