Barinya wangala, Wroe, 1999

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 : 324

† Barinya

SPECIES SCORED: † Barinya wangala (type species).

GEOLOGICAL PROVENANCE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Neville’s Garden, Bite’s Antennary and Upper sites (Riversleigh Faunal Zone B), and Henk’s Hollow and Jim’s Jaw sites (Riversleigh Faunal Zone C), Riversleigh World Heritage Area, Queensland, Australia.

AGE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Based on biostratigraphy, Riversleigh Faunal Zone B is interpreted to be early Miocene (Archer et al., 1989, 1994, 1995, 1997, 2006; Creaser, 1997; Travouillon et al., 2006; Black et al., 2012b, 2013; Woodhead et al., 2014; Arena et al., 2015), and Faunal Zone C is interpreted to be middle Miocene (see † Nimbacinus above). Radiometric dates from Woodhead et al. (2014) are 17.72–18.53 Mya for Neville’s Garden Site and 16.84–17.38 Mya for Bite’s Antennary Site, but the other sites lack dates, so we have conservatively assumed the entire span of the early to middle Miocene (Aquitanian to Serravallian; Cohen et al., 2013 [updated]) for this taxon.

ASSIGNED AGE RANGE: 23.030 –11.630 Mya.

REMARKS: Wroe (1999) described † Barinya wangala as the oldest known dasyurid based on two relatively complete skulls (QM F31408 and F314089) plus additional dental specimens. Wroe (1999) identified a number of putative dasyurid apomorphies in the auditory region, but Murray and Megirian (2006a) subsequently argued that at least some of these features may have been secondarily lost in thylacinids. Among dasyuromorphians, † B. wangala is dentally autapomorphic in exhibiting a very large bulbous P3, somewhat reminiscent of the enlarged P3 seen in males of some Recent peramelemorphians (see Aplin et al., 2010: 26–31). A second species, † B. kutjamarpensis, was described by Binfield et al. (2016), based on a single partial right dentary (SAM P53348) from the the?early-middle Miocene Leaf Locality of the Kutjamarpu Local Fauna in the Wipajiri Formation, Lake Ngapakaldi, Tirari Desert, Lake Eyre Basin, South Australia (Woodburne et al., 1994; Archer et al., 1997; Travouillon et al., 2006; Megirian et al., 2010; Black et al., 2012b, 2013, 2014a; Gurovich et al., 2014); however, † B. kutjamarpensis has not been used for scoring purposes here.

† Barinya was recovered as a dasyurid in the phylogenetic analyses of Wroe et al. (2000), Wroe and Musser (2001), and Murray and Megirian (2006a), but not in those of Archer et al. (2016) or Kealy and Beck (2017), and in only some of those by Rovinsky et al. (2019); we therefore follow Kealy and Beck (2017) in considering this taxon Daysuromorphia incertae sedis.