Hypsiprymnodon † bartholomaii (Flannery and Archer, 1987) Ramsay, 1876

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 : 334-335

Hypsiprymnodon

SPECIES SCORED: Hypsiprymnodon † bartholomaii .

GEOLOGICAL PROVENANCE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Riversleigh Faunal Zone C, Riversleigh World Heritage Area, Queensland, Australia.

AGES 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: 15.97–11.63 Mya.

REMARKS: Hypsiprymnodon † bartholomaii was described by Flannery and Archer (1987a) based on a partial cranium and two isolated molars, all from the Gag Site, which is part of Riversleigh Faunal Zone C. If this taxon is indeed referable to Hypsiprymnodon , then it indicates that the genus originated prior to the middle Miocene. However, Flannery and Archer (1987a) noted a number of striking craniodental differences between H. † bartholomaii and the Recent species H. moschatus , notably parietal-alisphenoid versus frontal-squamosal contact and presence versus absence of a distinct postglenoid process. Three further fossil Hypsiprymnodon species have recently been described from Riversleigh Faunal zones B and C sites (Bates et al., 2014), but we did not examine these for scoring purposes. Some phylogenetic analyses have found Hypsiprymnodon to be polyphyletic (Black et al., 2014c; den Boer and Kear, 2018: fig. S11), others have found it to be paraphyletic (den Boer and Kear, 2018: figs. S9–10), and still others have failed to unambiguously support its monophyly (Bates et al., 2014; Butler et al., 2016, 2018; den Boer and Kear, 2018: supplemental data), but that of Travouillon et al. (2016) placed Recent and fossil Hypsiprymnodon species in a clade that also included the propleopines, † Ekaltadeta , † Jackmahoneya , and † Propleopus .