During study of the fossil rodent material from the Csodabogyós Cave, a rich Vasseuromys assemblage was elaborated. Some metrical and morphological characteristics of the finds differ from the Late Miocene (MN 11) Vasseuromys pannonicus from Eichkogel and Kohfidisch and also vary from Vasseuromys tectus described from Ukraine. In this publication a taxonomical description of the new species is presented with its palaeogeographical and paleoecological relationships.
This publication aims to give a detailed taxonomic description of the rich Neocricetodon material collected from Csodabogyós Cave (Keszthely Hills, close to the village Balatonederics) in 2023. The sample is homogenous and close to Neocricetodon skofleki.
The Early Miocene fluvio-marine and terrestrial deposits at Moghara, Qattara Depression, northern Egypt, have previously yielded several fragmentary mandibles of cercopithecoids and a humerus of a medium-sized anthropoid. In 2010, while studying Moghara fossils at the Cairo Geological Museum, the first author noticed an unpublished edentulous mandible of a primate that was collected in 1994 (specimen M94-90). The jaw is slightly larger than the type specimen and other material of Prohylobates tandyi and initially it was thought to belong to this species, but close examination reveals that it differs in a number of morphological features from mandibles of the latter taxon. All the differences point towards the identification of M94-90 as a hominoid or more likely as a pliopithecoid, and they distance it from the Cercopithecoidea. Its dimensions indicate an animal approximately the size of small gibbons such as Hylobates. In addition, there is an isolated lower canine in the Cairo University collections that is compatible in size and morphology with the unpublished mandible. This tooth, that was collected in 2005, is similar to specimens of Micropithecus clarki Fleagle et Simons, 1978, from the Early Miocene of Napak, Uganda, but also shows some resemblance to canines of pliopithecoids from Europe.
A detailed study was conducted of the fourth lower premolar (p4) of Ursus rossicus from several localities, representing different temporal stages in the evolution of the Eurasian Pleistocene biota. Distinctive features were identified of p4 molarisation at various stages of the evolution of small cave bears. The lower fourth premolar U. rossicus nordostensis from the Pleistocene of Arctic Siberia shares with U. rossicus s. l. the derived morphology of the lingual trigonid cusps, but retains the basal deningeroid trait, such as the narrowed distal contour of the crown of p4. By the end of the Middle Pleistocene, p4 of U. rossicus exhibited a maximum molarisation, displaying a multicuspidate pattern in both the trigonid and talonid parts, as observed in the type series from the Krasnodar locality and additional material from the Irgiz 1 locality. At the same time, the Late Pleistocene set of p4 from the Imanay locality, while having most of the U. rossicus characteristics, displayed a wide spectrum of morphotypes, ranging from simple to a multicuspidate one. Additionally, it was revealed that molarisation of p4 in cave bears followed a different evolutionary trajectory. In U. rossicus, there was a complication on both trigonid and talonid. In contrast, in large cave bears, mostly the trigonid part of p4 became complicated, while the talonid remained relatively short, lacking most additional cusps.
The Early Miocene anthracotheres from the Austrian Paratethyan Eggenburgian deposits of the Eggenburg Marine Bay have proven to be of great interest for taxonomy and biostratigraphy. The discovery of specimens in the region of Eggenburg led to the erection of the genus Brachyodus in 1895, and their association with marine fossils in the subjacent deposits helped to establish their biostratigraphic position within the Eggenburgian stratigraphic interval, which has generally been correlated to the Burdigalian of France and elsewhere in Europe. Even though the quantity of material is limited, the fossils continue to throw light on the morphology and taxonomy of the group, this paper dealing with some undescribed cranial and mandibular fossils that provide evidence concerning the tusk-like teeth of these anthracotheres. The said teeth are incisors, and not canines. The upper tusk-like tooth is the central incisor, whereas the lower one is the second incisor, and it is inserted in the antero-lateral corner of the fully fused symphysis. Metric analysis of the teeth indicates the presence of three species of anthracothere in the Austrian deposits, two of which are attributed to Brachyodus and one to Masrimeryx. A general revision of all the Austrian dento-gnathic material of these large-bodied hydrophile mammals is provided.
The locality of Miesenheim I has yielded a rich assemblage of smaller mammals (Eulipotyphla, Lagomorpha, and Rodentia) comprising 28 taxa. Insectivores (Order Eulipotyphla), with over 2,000 identifiable remains, are well represented. The fauna includes four species from the family Soricidae (Neomys cf. newtoni, Sorex minutus, S. subaraneus, and Sorex (Drepanosorex) savini) and three taxa from the family Talpidae (Talpa europaea, T. minor, and Desmana sp.). Sorex subaraneus and Neomys cf. newtoni are the most commonly found species, whereas Desmana sp. is rare. The fauna originates from the early Toringian and is associated with the later part of the early Middle Pleistocene (pre-Elsterian/Cromerian IV/Marine Isotope Stage 13). The composition of the Miesenheim I insectivore assemblage is typical of late Biharian and early Toringian faunas; it contrasts with that of the late Toringian faunas. Furthermore, morphological differences have been observed between the remains from Miesenheim I and those from younger faunas.
The first abundant vertebrate and mollusc fauna from a travertine complex Dreveník (northern Slovakia) is preliminarily reported. The greatly diversified community of small mammals (580 MNI, 38 spp.) is characterized by the simultaneous appearance of elements otherwise restricted to the earliest Biharian stage (such as Petenyia, Pitymimomys pitymyoides), those related to the late Biharian clades (Mimomys savini, Cricetus c. runtonenesis), and the typical elements of the late early Biharian (such as Pliomys episcopalis, Mimomys pusillus, Pliomys hollitzeri, including a derived form of Pliomys coronensis). A rich assemblage of early Microtus (s. l.) clade exhibiting an extreme phenotype diversity covering a broad spectrum of diverse transitional morphotypes is compared with the situation in other European sites of assumed age along the early/late Biharian transition. The common biostratigraphic characteristics of these sites and the stratigraphic setting of the transitional period between the early and late Biharian (Q 1 and Q 2 zones in terms of Horáček and Ložek 1988) are discussed. The record of non-mammalian vertebrates and particularly the molluscs assemblage (2,452 MNI, 51 spp.), supposedly the richest reported for that stage in Europe, further supplement the report with detailed paleoenvironmental reconstructions.
Prolagus michauxi López-Martínez, 1975 (Prolagidae, Lagomorpha) is one of the best known and most widespread species of its genus. It was described from Sète, a karst filling located in southern France that has yielded a rich fauna of micromammals. Its age is estimated between 3.5–3.0 Ma. This study provides as complete as possible a picture of the cranial and dental morphology by the analysis of the characters and their variation. Usually, the cranial and postcranial material is poorly represented in the fossil record, and thus little studied. Abundance of cranial and dental remains in Sète is an exception and allows for a better characterisation of P. michauxi. Detailed comparisons with contemporary species show its great resemblances with P. sorbinii Masini, 1989 from Italy with regard to dental features, but it differs by the characters of the cranium and the mandible. It is well known that the Alpine uplift and the progressive aridification of the Mediterranean region since the terminal Miocene (Messinian) have led to the fragmentation of habitats and, as far as the genus Prolagus is concerned, to the occurrence of numerous speciations. To adapt to these new conditions, some Mio-Pliocene species of Prolagus, in particular P. michauxi, have developed an enlarged premolar foramen next to upper cheek teeth and numerous foramina on the hard palate that allow for better thermoregulation. The fragmentation of habitats may also explain a great variation in dental morphologies in various Pliocene species whose geographical range extends from Portugal to Ukraine and Asia Minor, and also to North Africa. Indeed, P. michauxi is abundantly represented in the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb. Also, it was reported from several sites in Greece and Asia Minor, but the material is scarce, which makes the identifications uncertain.
Thanks to a multidisciplinary project on Grotta Romanelli started in 2015 (director. R. Sardella, Sapienza, University of Rome), new dating and new stratigraphic interpretations of the deposit have allowed us to understand that the deposit is much more complex than G. A. Blanc believed, and much older. In this context, thanks to the complete sieving of the sediment, it was possible to collect, for the first time, an abundant collection of small vertebrates. Among these, the most common are micromammals. This paper discusses the presence of a rare small mammal in the Italian stratigraphic sequences, Microtus (I.) brecciensis. The occurrence of Microtus (Iberomys) brecciensis in the Middle Pleistocene layers of Grotta Romanelli (Lecce, Apulia) is documented here for the first time. The fossil sample is represented by three first lower molars (m1). Microtus (I.) brecciensis lived in the Salento peninsula about 325 ky BP, in wooded environments with few open areas and significant water bodies, along with Hippopotamus cf. amphibius, Palaeoloxodon antiquus and Stephanorhinus hundsheimensis.
The familiar fat dormice, Glis, are among the most characteristic European rodents. With only two living species, their modern diversity represents but relics of an impressive past radiation, dating back to the Oligocene epoch, some 30 Ma. Throughout most of their evolutionary history, members of the genus have evolved little from what is considered the primitive glirid morphotype. In this sense, fat dormice might be called living fossils. This paper discusses the past diversity of the genus Glis, reviewing our knowledge of all eleven currently recognized species and some problematic taxa. The Early Miocene G. complicatus is identified as a full species, distinct from morphologically more derived and geologically younger G. minor. The Middle Pleistocene G. percoi is synonymised with G. mihevci. Morphological trends within the genus include an increase in size, a tendency towards more heavily built, isolated, straightened and transversal lophs on more flattened occlusal surfaces, rudimentary accessory ridges, weaker anterotropes, and more parallel protoloph and metaloph of M1–2.
The Siwalik record includes the oldest stem representatives of the Murinae, and notably the genus Progonomys, the oldest known murine genus that dispersed broadly across the Old World. In this study we erect a new Siwalik murine genus to clarify the content of the genus Progonomys. This new genus elucidates an early stem, a hitherto unrecognized branch of the subfamily Murinae. While it did not disperse as Progonomys did, so far as known, it attests to southern Asia’s real and potential significance to early murine diversity and as one source of the Indo-Malayan dispersal of murine rodents.
The Csodabogyós Cave in western Hungary yielded a rich terrestrial vertebrate fauna during two excavations in 2023. The material comprises 1,053 amphibian and reptile remains, 51 bird bones, 5,640 identifiable mammal teeth and bones, and thousands of bone fragments. The fauna of the Csodabogyós Cave is most similar to that of the nearby Kohfidisch site (Burgenland, Austria). In the description of the shrew material, we raise the need to establish a new genus for “Petenyia” dubia Bachmayer et Wilson, 1970, we extend the stratigraphic range of Asoriculus gibberodon (Petényi, 1864) to the beginning of the MN 11 Zone, and we present a morphological transition between Crusafontina kormosi (Bachmayer et Wilson, 1970) and its descendant, Amblycoptus oligodon Kormos, 1924. Within the bat fauna, Myotis is the richest genus, with six forms. All three size ranges of Rhinolophus are represented, and Miniopterus and Plecotus also occur at the site. In addition, to the typical Late Miocene species of the rodent fauna, a new species of glirid (Vasseuromys n. sp.) and the westernmost and one of the oldest finds of the genus Microtoscoptes are described from the site. Based on the paleoecological analysis, the site’s environment was highly diverse. On the shores of Lake Pannon, a gallery forest and shrub vegetation were found, while further away from the lake was a wooded savannah, with semi-open karstic areas on the higher parts. It may have been warm, but drier than the Middle Miocene, with a seasonal climate, probably characterised by hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters. The age of the fauna is estimated to be approximately 8.7–8.5 million years (early Turolian, MN 11).
In the present work, we adopt the comparative logic and methodologies used by Fejfar and colleagues, embedding Spanish faunal assemblages into continental frameworks through the evolutionary history of arvicoline rodents. Over the past three decades in Spain, extensive new collections have been made and existing materials have been re-evaluated. The present work honors the intellectual legacy of Oldřich Fejfar, whose fundamental contributions have shaped Spanish Quaternary small mammal biochronology. Fejfar’s work, focused on refining arvicoline systematics, developing interregional correlation schemes, and demonstrating the biochronological power of small mammals, provides the essential framework upon which our research is built. This study applies his intellectual legacy to Iberian faunas, highlighting their continued significance for Quaternary stratigraphy and paleoecology. In the present work, the geological time selected is the Piacenzian, Gelasian, Calabrian (around 3.1–0.7 Ma), which shows a likely correlation between Central Europe and Spain, using Arvicolinae mammals during the latest Pliocene and Early Pleistocene interval.
Platacanthomyid rodents are rare finds in European Miocene mammalian faunas, but have proved to be useful for biochronology, since the only genus Neocometes has a long chronological range in the Early and Middle Miocene of Europe. The chronospecies concept established by Oldřich Fejfar, includes three taxa; the youngest species, N. brunonis, is known from only a short stratigraphic period (early Astaracian, middle and late Badenian). Here we describe an upper M3 of N. brunonis from the Hammerschmiede level HAM4, magnetostratigraphically dated to 11.58 Ma (late Astaracian, earliest Pannonian), extending the Last Occurrence Date (LOD) for Neocometes by 1.7 myrs, into early Late Miocene.
Amber deposits are rare in Jurassic successions, occurring in small quantities, whereas Lower Cretaceous strata host many substantial and commonly fossiliferous amber deposits worldwide. Minor amounts of Early Jurassic amber have been reported from Italy, and small amounts of Late Jurassic amber are known from Lebanon, Jordan and Thailand. Other Jurassic amber deposits that require reinvestigation of their age and provenance have also been reported from Denmark and France. Few of these amber deposits contain fossils, the others lack inclusions, suggesting a ‘Jurassic amber gap’ in the fossil record. Here, we surveyed fossil plant collections held at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm, for amber and amberproducing plants from Jurassic floras. We focused on the collection of plants from Shaanxi, China and the Middle Jurassic floras of Iran and Afghanistan from the H.-J. Schweitzer collection. Using a hand-held UV light microscope, we scanned the collections for resinous remains as ambers can show autofluorescence with UV light, but found no dispersed amber fragments or droplets. Some researchers refer to fossilized resin within plant tissues under that name to differentiate it from exuded resins preserved as amber, and we follow this convention. We identified a conifer fragment of Elatocladus sp. from China with in situ rods of resin preserved in the leaves and a unique conifer twig (Elatides sp.) from Afghanistan with tiny linear resin traces in leaves that were only visible via autofluorescence with UV light. These resinous traces likely define the former position of resin canals in the leaves, but the resin is not preserved as in situ rods. Instead, it has impregnated the coalified mesophyll, likely during fossilization, to form thin lines (chemical ‘ghosts’ of preserved resin) within the conifer leaf remains.
We reinvestigated type material and subsequently collected fossil nuts of Carya costata (C.Presl ex Unger) Unger based on type material from the Oligocene of western Bohemia. These specimens are older than most occurrences of C. ventricosa (C.Presl ex Brongn.) Unger which has its type locality in the Miocene of Salzhausen, Germany. Although preserved only as molds and casts in tuffaceous volcanoclastic siltstone, micro-CT scanning indicates that the morphology of C. costata is nearly identical to that of C. ventricosa. The preservation of these nuts as 3-dimensional molds retains evidence of gnawing indicating that, as today, hickory nuts were an important food source for mammals and/or birds of the Oligocene.
Terrestrially-derived cryptospores from Cambrian deposits in eastern Tennessee were examined using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to determine the underlying structural basis for spore wall construction in these pre-embryophytic spore types. In addition to previously-described species from the middle Cambrian Conasauga Group, we examined new specimens extracted from the Rome Formation, which are coeval to the oldest reported cryptospores from North China. Our results reveal a substantial diversity of endogenous laminated sporoderm construction, expanding on the three basic types described previously. The underlying cellular processes involved in the production of sporopollenin wall construction were in place by the middle Cambrian, but a modern form of spore wall assembly did not evolve until the canalization of plant-like sporogenesis during the Middle Ordovician.
Bed TB33, a lacustrine unit within the late Eocene (early Priabonian) How Ledge Limestone, Headon Hill, Isle of Wight, UK, contains a rich mammalian fauna. The previously reconstructed food web included mammalian predators and prey (ground dwelling, scansorial and arboreal; insectivores, frugivores, herbivores and carnivores) and two inferred owls. Unfortunately, the extensive bulk sediment sampling and sieving used to obtain the vertebrate fauna had not yielded any plant fossils other than charophyte gyrogonites. This new work has focused on plant mesofossils and palynofacies in the uppermost horizons of the vertebrate-rich bed aiming to reconstruct the vegetation that hosted the mammals. Other than cysts of Zygnemataceae, phytoplankton are absent. The presence of the aquatic plants Azolla and Salvinia on the lake is documented by megaspores and microspore massulae. The palynomorphs are dominated by algal cysts, Azolla microspore massulae fragments and two morphologies of trilete fern spores. These data document a depositional setting in a lake with abundant free-floating Azolla or Salvinia and with a margin vegetation dominated by ferns. The data support one of our previous inferences that the arboreal mammals were brought to the site from some distance away by predators. However, the challenge to fully reconstruct the mammalian habitats remains.
