Department of Basic Medical Sciences, University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ, United States of America.
School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, United States of America.
PeerJ. 2022 Mar 15;10:e13032. doi: 10.7717/peerj.13032. eCollection 2022.
Machaeroidinae is a taxonomically small clade of early and middle Eocene carnivorous mammals that includes the earliest known saber-toothed mammalian carnivores. Machaeroidine diversity is low, with only a handful of species described from North America and Asia. Here we report a new genus and species of machaeroidine, , established on the basis of a nearly complete dentary with most of the dentition from the late Uintan (middle Eocene) portion of the Santiago Formation of southern California. The new taxon is the youngest known machaeroidine and provides the first evidence for the presence of multiple machaeroidine lineages, as it differs substantially from , the only near-contemporaneous member of the group. Phylogenetic analysis indicates that is the sister taxon of , while older species are recovered as a monophyletic . Both phylogenetic results are relatively weakly supported. The new taxon extends the record of machaeroidines to the end of the Uintan, potentially tying machaeroidine extinction to the faunal turnover spanning the middle to late Eocene transition in North America.
Machaeroidinae 是一个分类学上很小的早、中始新世肉食性哺乳动物类群,包括最早已知的剑齿类哺乳动物捕食者。Machaeroidine 的多样性较低,仅从北美和亚洲描述了少数几种。在这里,我们基于来自加利福尼亚州南部圣地亚哥组晚尤坦期(中始新世)部分的近乎完整的齿骨和大部分牙齿,报道了一种新的 Machaeroidinae 属种,。新分类群是已知最年轻的 Machaeroidine,并为存在多个 Machaeroidine 谱系提供了第一个证据,因为它与该组唯一的近同时代成员有很大的不同。系统发育分析表明,是 的姐妹分类群,而较老的物种则被恢复为一个单系的 。这两个系统发育结果的支持度都相对较弱。新分类群将 Machaeroidine 的记录扩展到尤坦期末,可能将 Machaeroidine 的灭绝与横跨北美的中到晚始新世过渡时期的动物群更替联系起来。