CARNIVORA, FossiL A few remains of animals regarded as belonging to the Carnivore have been found in rocks of Eocene Age, but they are extremely generalized forms, and have a doubtful, if any, connection with the earlier creodonts (see CiumeowtA). The Miocene rocks have yielded more, but still of very generalized or ((synthetic) types, suggesting the ancestry of the dogs and civets; one is the European fossil genus Cynodictis, called a dog,' because it combines rudely characteristics of the fox and civet. eThis,) says Ernest Ingersoll ((Life of New York 1909), 4( shades off into the many species of Gakcynus, and of Amphicyon, plantigrade animals existing in all parts of the Miocene world, and varying in size from that of a small fox to that of a long bodied bear,— a huge combination of wolf, mungoos, and bear I Others of the same or a later time are more nearly typical civets, or stand between such and the linsangs, or con nect civets and weasels; while at the beginning of the next, or Pliocene, period, there appears a curious animal, the ictithere, which com pletely unites the civets with the hyenas.
Amphicyon plantigrade and had other bearlike characteristics. Besides it, as we know from Miocene fossils, lived another animal (Hemicyon), which was more dog than civet, plus bearlike features; and later we find Hyenorctos still more ursine, so that these rep resent a line of change from bearlike dogs into doglike bears, and connect the Amphicyon stock with the true bears and raccoons. In a similar way fossil forms of the Upper Eocene and Lower Miocene connect the civet stock with the apparent ancestors of the fur-bearers (weasels, badgers, otters, etc.). It is not, in deed, until the late Miocene, near the end of the Tertiary period, that the groups of Carniv ora as we now see them became distinctly set apart from one another by the dying out of the old intermediate stock forms." Consult Os born, 'Age of Mammals' (New York 1910); Scott, 'History of Land Mammals in the West ern Hemisphere' (New York 1913).