Palaeothentes

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 : 321

† Palaeothentes

SPECIES SCORED: † Palaeothentes minutus , † P. lemoinei.

GEOLOGICAL PROVENANCE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Santa Cruz Formation, Santa Cruz Province, Argentina.

AGE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: the Santa Cruz Formation spans a maximum of 14 to 19 Mya (see † Stilotherium above).

ASSIGNED AGE RANGE: 19.000 –14.000 Mya.

REMARKS: We scored † Palaeothentes minutus based on abundant but mostly fragmentary specimens collected by Carlos Ameghino from several localities in the early Miocene Santa Cruz Formation; this material has been revised by Marshall (1980) and Abello (2007). Bown and Fleagle (1993) subsequently collected considerable additional dental material of † P. minutus from localities in the Santa Cruz and Pinturas formations, and Marshall (1990) identified this species from the?middle Miocene (Friasian SALMA) Río Frias Formation in Chile; however, we did not use these additional specimens for scoring purposes. Croft (2007: table 3) reported † P. minutus from the middle Miocene (Laventan SALMA) Quebrada Honda Fauna in southern Bolivia, but Engelman et al. (2016) subsequently referred this material to two new species († P. serratus and † P. relictus), and we did not use it to score our † Palaeothentes terminal.

Well-preserved cranial material of † Palaeothentes minutus is unavailable, but Forasiepi et al. (2014b) described a well-preserved skull and partial skeleton (MPM-PV 3566) of a congeneric species, †P. lemoinei, also from the Santa Cruz Formation. Monophyly of † Palaeothentes (excluding “† Palaeothentes ” primus) has been found in all recent large-scale phylogenetic analyses of Paucituberculata (Abello, 2013; Rincón et al., 2015; Engelman et al., 2016; Abello et al., 2020), so we used Forasiepi et al.’s (2014b) description of the skull of †P. lemoinei to score cranial characters for our † Palaeothentes terminal. † Palaeothentes is the type genus of the family † Palaeothentidae , which is a member of the superfamily †Palaeothentoidea (Abello, 2007, 2013; Goin et al., 2009a; Rincón et al., 2015; Engelman et al., 2016; Abello et al., 2020).