was coarse and straight, but not spiny. In color, they varied from grizzled grey through fawn to orange-brown, and the belly and underparts were white with the fur on the ears being of chestnut color. The genus had five pairs of upper and three pairs of lower incisor teeth; tooth shape differed between the two species. The females of the genus had eight nipples and the opening of the pouch was faced backwards, not forwards as is the case with kangaroos. Depictions of the species include a lithograph by Henry C. Richter in John Gould's Mammals of Australia, published in the mid-19th century. An unpublished illustration by Richter, under the direction of Gould, was discovered in the archives of Knowsley Hall, at one time home to a great patron of natural history, the Earl of Derby. The species C. ecaudatus was selected by Peter Schouten and Tim Flannery for a series of paintings illustrating the known information on the species' appearance and habits, published in a book surveying the modern extinctions of animals. Another reconstruction of the genus was produced by Schouten to illustrate the species C. yirratji. Distribution and habitat The two species were native to western New South Wales and Victoria, the southern part of the Northern Territory and South Australia and Western Australia. Chaeropus ecaudatus populated semiarid southern regions of southern Australia, extending to southwest Australia, while C. yirratji populated sandy environments extending from Western Australia to the deserts in central Australia. They inhabited a wide range of habitat types, from grassy woodland and grassland plains to the spinifex country and arid flats of central Australia. Despite its wide range, the genus had a sparse distribution and was never abundant. The number of complete specimens found in museum collections is 29. Historical records of collections in central and western Australia, where it was sometimes locally common, begin with a specimen obtained at the Peron Peninsula during the Uranie expedition led by Louis de Freycinet in 1818. John Gilbert recorded his observations at dense stands of Casuarina seedlings (Allocasuarina species) at the interior of the southwest, beyond Northam, but did not appear in the Avon valley, inland from the new colony at Perth, at new settlements near Toodyay, York, and the Wongan Hills area. On his second collecting expedition in the southwest he recorded the species at King George Sound, on the southern coast of Western Australia. The