The anthracotheres from northern Junggar Basin and their palaeoclimatic significance in relation to the Tibetan Plateau
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ORIGINAL PAPER
The anthracotheres from northern Junggar Basin and their palaeoclimatic significance in relation to the Tibetan Plateau Shi-Qi Wang 1,2 Received: 1 April 2019 / Revised: 29 March 2020 / Accepted: 9 July 2020 # Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Anthracotheres were an environmentally sensitive group that were thought to have become extinct from the middle-high latitudes of the northern hemisphere by the early Miocene. Hereby, the present author reports previously unpublished fossil bothriodonts, a group of anthracotheres, from the northern Junggar Basin, in China’s far northwest. An M3 of a small bothriodont Elomeryx sp., from the lower part of the Halamagai Formation, which is probably of the early middle Miocene age, is the only anthracothere record from the Neogene of northern China. More importantly, it is the latest anthracothere record from the middle-high latitudes of the northern hemisphere. The other teeth from Xiaerhete locality of the Irtysh River Formation, which is of the late Eocene age, are identified as Bakalovia sp. This poorly known genus was previously only reported from the middle or late Eocene of Southwest Europe. This study complements the sparse anthracothere fossil records of northwestern China. The present material, together with previous records, strongly suggests the occurrence of anthracothere interchanges between East Asia and both Europe and North America possibly from the middle or late Eocene to the early Oligocene. Anthracotheres declined remarkably in the Oligocene and Miocene in northern China, in contrast to their continued abundance in South and Southeast Asia at the same time, suggesting the existence of climate zonation and a faunal discontinuity in mammal distribution patterns between the northern and southern China. This zonation was probably related to the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau, which altered atmospheric circulation throughout Eastern Asia. Keywords Bothriodontinae . Elomeryx . Bakalovia . Mongolian Remodelling . Mid-Miocene Climate Optimum
Introduction Anthracotheres were a group of suiform artiodactyls with bunodont to bunoselenodont cheek teeth (Lihoreau and Ducrocq 2007). Their body size varied from small-deer-like animals to large, hippopotamus-like beasts; thus, they diversified into a range of ecomorphs during their evolutionary history. Anthracotheres probably originated in Southeast Asia during the middle Eocene, then flourished between the middle–late Eocene and early Oligocene, achieving very wide distribution throughout Eurasia, Africa and North America
* Shi-Qi Wang [email protected] 1
Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and Human Origins of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100044, China
2
CAS Center for Excellence in Life and Paleoenvironment, Beijing 100101, China
(Lihoreau and Ducrocq 2007). However, anthracotheres gradually declined in diversity in t
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