As instances of such combinations, some of the (probably herbivorous) Eocene monkeys with arboreal limbs have teeth so difficult to distinguish from those of the herbivorous ground-living Eocene horses with cursorial limbs that at first in France and also in America they were both classed with the hoofed animals.
More or less independently, Huxley, Kowalevsky and Cope restored the stem ancestor of the hoofed animals, or ungulates, a restoration which has been nearly fulfilled by the discovery, in 1873, of the generalized type Phenacodus of northern Wyoming.
We observe the contemporaneous and largely independent radiations of the hoofed animals in South America, in Africa and in the great ancient continent comprising Europe, Asia and North America; we observe the Cretaceous radiation of hoofed animals in the northern hemisphere, followed by a second radiation of hoofed animals in the same region, in some cases one surviving spur of an old radiation becoming the centre of a new one.
Rodents may be characterized as terrestrial, or in some cases arboreal or aquatic, placental mammals of small or medium size, with a milk and a permanent series of teeth, plantigrade or partially plantigrade, and generally five-toed, clawed (rarely nailed or semi hoofed) feet, clavicles or collar-bones (occasionally imperfect or rudimentary), no canine teeth, and a single pair of lower incisors, opposed by only one similar and functional pair in the upper jaw.
These bones, although separate, have their adjacent surfaces more closely applied than is the case in the latter; while in this and the earlier genera the terminal toe-bones indicate that the foot was of the normal hoofed type.
