Bettongia, Gray, 1837

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 : 335

? Bettongia

SPECIES SCORED:? Bettongia † moyesi.

GEOLOGICAL PROVENANCE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Henk’s Hollow and Two Trees sites (Riversleigh Faunal Zone C), Riversleigh World Heritage Area, Queensland, Australia.

AGE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Riversleigh Faunal Zone C is interpreted to be middle Miocene based on biostratigraphy (see above). In the absence of radiometric dates, we have assumed the entire span of the middle Miocene (Langhian to Serravallian; Cohen et al., 2013 [updated]) for this terminal.

ASSIGNED AGE RANGE: 15.970 –11.630 Mya.

REMARKS: Flannery and Archer (1987b) referred this fossil taxon, which is represented by a partial skull and associated mandibles plus an additional left mandibular fragment, to the Recent potoroid genus Bettongia , but we consider it only questionably a member of this genus based on available evidence, which we summarize briefly here. Flannery and Archer (1987b) noted particular similarities between? B. † moyesi and the living B. lesueur . The phylogenetic analysis of Kear et al. (2007) recovered a sister-group relationship between? B. † moyesi and the extant potoroid Potorous tridactylus to the exclusion of other macropodiforms in their taxon sample, supporting the potoroid affinities of? B. † moyesi. However, P. tridactylus was the sole Recent potoroid included by Kear et al. (2007), so the precise position of? B. † moyesi within Potoroidae (and, particularly, its relationship to recent Bettongia species) remained uncertain in this analysis. The phylogenetic analysis of Travouillon et al. (2016), meanwhile, recovered? B. † moyesi within Potoroidae but outside the crown clade. Some other published analyses have failed to place? B. † moyesi within Potoroidae (Travouillon et al., 2015a: fig. 5A; Butler et al., 2016, 2018; den Boer and Kear, 2018: supplemental data), or have found its relationship relative to Macropodidae and Potoroidae to be largely unresolved (Bates et al., 2014; Black et al., 2014c; Travouillon et al., 2014b, 2015a: fig. 5B; Cooke et al., 2015; den Boer and Kear, 2018: supplemental data).