The almost full humerus — or higher arm bone — of a pangolin from the paleontological website of Grăunceanu in Romania definitively demonstrates that these animals had been current in Europe throughout the Pleistocene epoch.
The large pangolin (Smutsia gigantea) by Joseph Wolf.
Pangolins are mammals of the order Pholidota recognized from Asia and Africa. The one residing household of pangolins, the Manidae, has three genera: Manis, Phataginus, and Smutsia.
Often known as scaly anteaters, they give the impression of being considerably just like the armadillos that roam the southern United States.
Pangolins are additionally among the many most illegally trafficked animals on the earth. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the eight species of residing pangolins vary from Vulnerable to Critically Endangered.
The newly-discovered pangolin fossil belongs a beforehand unknown species of the genus Smutsia, which is presently discovered solely in Africa.
“Smutsia has previously been thought to be an African genus, with the oldest specimen from South Africa at 5 million years ago and living species found across Africa,” stated Dr. Claire Terhune, a researcher on the University of Arkansas, and her colleagues.
“This specimen now demonstrates that Smutsia previously had a far larger biogeographic range.”
The fossilized humerus of Smutsia olteniensis. Image credit score: Terhune et al., doi: 10.1080/02724634.2021.1990075.
Named Smutsia olteniensis, the brand new species lived between about 1.9 and a couple of.2 million years in the past (Pleistocene epoch).
Its almost full humerus was discovered on the website of Grăunceanu in Romania.
“It’s not a fancy fossil. It’s just a single bone, but it is a new species of a kind of a weird animal,” Dr. Terhune stated.
“We’re proud of it because the fossil record for pangolins is extremely sparse.”
“This one happens to be the youngest pangolin ever discovered from Europe and the only pangolin fossil from Pleistocene Europe.”
According to the workforce, the identification of this fossil as a pangolin is critical as a result of earlier analysis steered that pangolins disappeared from the European paleontological file throughout the middle-Miocene, nearer to 10 million years in the past.
Previous work hypothesized that pangolins had been pushed towards extra tropical and sub-tropical equatorial environments because of international cooling developments.
“The site of Grăunceanu has been reconstructed to have consisted of relatively open grasslands and woodlands, which is an unusual habitat for most pangolins,” the paleontologists stated.
The workforce’s paper was printed December 21, 2021 within the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
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Claire E. Terhune et al. The youngest pangolin (Mammalia, Pholidota) from Europe. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, printed on-line December 21, 2021; doi: 10.1080/02724634.2021.1990075