Hadronomas puckridgi, Woodburne, 1967

Beck, Robin M. D., Voss, Robert S. & Jansa, Sharon A., 2022, Craniodental Morphology And Phylogeny Of Marsupials, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2022 (457), pp. 1-353 : 337

† Hadronomas

SPECIES SCORED: † Hadronomas puckridgi (type and only described species).

GEOLOGICAL PROVENANCE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Alcoota Local Fauna, Alcoota Station, Northern Territory, Australia.

AGE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Black et al. (2013: 1036) summarized evidence regarding the age of the Alcoota Local Fauna, which may be late Miocene (“Mitchellian,” ~8.2–10.8 Mya; Piper et al., 2006) or latest late Miocene to earliest Pliocene (“Cheltenhamian,” ~4.5–6.5 Mya; Fitzgerald and Kool, 2015). Congruent with this, Megirian et al. (2010) placed the Alcoota Local Fauna within their “Waitean” Australian Land Mammal Age, for which they gave boundary estimates of 5 and 12 Mya. This age range has been assumed in subsequent papers on the Alcoota Local Fauna (e.g., Yates, 2014; 2015a) and has been followed here.

ASSIGNED AGE RANGE: 12.000 –5.000 Mya.

REMARKS: Woodburne (1967) described † Hadronomas puckridgi based on fragmentary dental and mandibular specimens from the Alcoota Local Fauna, identifying it as a macropodid of uncertain affinities. Subsequent discovery of more complete cranial and also postcranial material led Murray (1989, 1991, 1995) to propose a close relationship between this taxon and sthenurine macropodids. Prideaux (2004) similarly concluded that † H. puckridgi is an early sthenurine, and this hypothesis has been supported in numerous subsequent phylogenetic analyses (Kear et al., 2007; Prideaux and Warburton, 2010; Prideaux and Tedford, 2012; Bates et al., 2014; Black et al., 2014c; Llamas et al., 2015: supplementary material; Travouillon et al., 2014b, 2015a, 2016; Cooke et al., 2015; Butler et al., 2018; den Boer and Kear, 2018: supplemental data; Cascini et al., 2019).