Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt, Ornithological Section, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoecology (HEP), Eberhard-Karls University Tübingen, Institute for Geoscience, Tübingen, Germany.
PLoS One. 2020 May 6;15(5):e0232179. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0232179. eCollection 2020.
We report fossils of the darter Anhinga pannonica Lambrecht, 1916 from two late Miocene (Tortonian, 11.62 and 11.44 Ma) avifaunas in Southern Germany. The material from the hominid locality Hammerschmiede near Pforzen represents the most comprehensive record of this species and includes most major postcranial elements except for the tarsometatarsus. We furthermore show that the putative cormorant Phalacrocorax brunhuberi (von Ammon, 1918) from the middle Miocene of Regensburg-Dechbetten is another, previously misclassified, record of A. pannonica, and this may also be true for early Miocene fossils described as P. intermedius Milne-Edwards, 1867. A. pannonica was distinctly larger than extant darters and reached the size of A. grandis from the late Miocene of North America. We detail that only fossils from the Miocene of Europe and Africa can be referred to A. pannonica, whereas putative records from Asia fall within the size range of extant darters. A. pannonica appears to have been a long-living species (16 to 6 Ma) with an extensive distribution from the equator to the northern mid-latitudes. The extinction of large-sized darters in Europe is likely to have been due to climatic cooling in the late Neogene, but the reasons for their disappearance in Africa and South America remain elusive.
我们报道了来自德国南部两个晚中新世（托尔托纳阶，11.62 和 11.44 百万年前）鸟类动物群的斑鱼狗 Anhinga pannonica Lambrecht, 1916 的化石。来自霍曼人居住地哈默施米德（Hammerschmiede）附近的波岑的材料代表了该物种最全面的记录，包括除跗跖骨外的大多数主要后肢骨骼。我们进一步表明，来自雷根斯堡-德赫贝滕（Regensburg-Dechbetten）中中新世的假定鸬鹚 Phalacrocorax brunhuberi（von Ammon，1918）是 A. pannonica 的另一个以前被错误分类的记录，而对于被描述为 P. intermedius Milne-Edwards，1867 的早中新世化石来说，情况也可能如此。A. pannonica 明显大于现存的鱼狗，大小与北美晚中新世的 A. grandis 相当。我们详细说明，只有来自欧洲和非洲中新世的化石才能被归入 A. pannonica，而来自亚洲的假定记录则属于现存鱼狗的大小范围。A. pannonica 似乎是一种长寿物种（16 到 6 百万年前），分布范围从赤道到中纬度北部。欧洲大型鱼狗的灭绝可能是由于晚新生代的气候变冷，但它们在非洲和南美洲消失的原因仍不清楚。
