New finds of rodents and insectivores from the Upper Miocene at Plakias (Crete, Greece)
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New finds of rodents and insectivores from the Upper Miocene at Plakias (Crete, Greece) Hans de Bruijn • Constantin S. Doukas Lars W. van den Hoek Ostende • Willem Jan Zachariasse
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Received: 24 August 2011 / Accepted: 11 November 2011 / Published online: 6 December 2011 Ó Akademie der Naturwissenschaften Schweiz (SCNAT) 2011
Abstract This paper provides new information on the Late Miocene small mammal assemblage from Plakias, which includes a re-evaluation of the rodents described in De Bruijn and Meulenkamp (Proceedings Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Series B, 75(1), 54–60, 1972) and a description of the rodents and insectivores collected in 2011. Combined, they show a quite diverse fauna, dominated by the eomyid Eomyops cf. catalaunicus. The new collection yielded a hitherto unknown genus of murid (Cricetinae gen. et sp. indet), which brings, combined with Eumyarion leemanni and Cricetulodon cretensis, the number of murids on three. The previous identifications of the scuirids and glirids have been revised. Insectivores, not know from the original collection, are represented by Erinaceinae gen. et sp. indet, Lantanotherium sanmigueli and Paenelimnoecus sp. The assemblage is tentatively correlated to the lower part of MN 9, with an estimated age of *9.9 Ma. Keywords
Late Miocene Rodentia Insectivora Crete
H. de Bruijn W. J. Zachariasse Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University, Budapestlaan 4, 3584 CD Utrecht, The Netherlands C. S. Doukas Department of Geology, Kapodistrian University, Athens, Greece L. W. van den Hoek Ostende (&) Netherlands Center for Biodiversity, Naturalis, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]
Introduction While attending a conference on Crete in 2009 Albert van der Meulen, Constantin Doukas and the first author (HdB) revisited the fossil locality of Plakias (Fig. 1) that yielded some small mammal remains in the 1970s. We then decided to enlarge the sample the next summer. Although the old and the new collections both come from the same small outcrop (Fig. 2), the composition of the two samples is quite different. The old collection contains abundant fish teeth, but these are rare in the new collection. Among the mammalian remains in the old collection three out of the eight specimens are sciurids, while eomyids and insectivores are absent. In contrast, the dominating species in the new collection is an eomyid and insectivores are present, whereas sciurids and the murid that dominates the original sample are absent. Since the local situation has changed due to building activity during the 40 years that elapsed between our two visits to Plakias, it is conceivable that the two collections come from slightly different stratigraphic levels. However, the 25 cm thick grayish silty clay bed sampled in 2010 seems to be the only bed that contains vertebrate remains. Therefore, we shall treat the two samples as coming from the same site.
Methods The collection of 2011 was recovered by wet-screening about 2 tons of fossiliferous
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