期刊
ZOOLOGISCHER ANZEIGER
卷 252, 期 2, 页码 157-182出版社
ELSEVIER GMBH
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcz.2012.05.006
关键词
Serpentes; Loxocemus; Ungaliophiinae; Colubridae; Fossil; Climate change
类别
资金
- SYNTHESYS program [FR-TAF 218]
- Texas Memorial Museum at the University of Texas at Austin
- Senckenberg Gesellschaft fur Naturforschung (Frankfurt)
The Medicine Pole Hills of North Dakota, USA, afford an excellent view of an Eocene fauna in the Rocky Mountain interior prior to the climatic deterioration of the earliest Oligocene. I describe the snakes of this locality using 179 isolated vertebrae from all parts of the vertebral column as well as cranial elements. The assemblage comprises four species: (1) a primitive burrowing snake (anilioid); (2) a small boid related to Ungaliophiinae (dwarf boas); (3) a mid-sized booid related to Loxocemus (Mexican Burrowing Python); and (4) a colubrid. The dwarf boa, Calamagras weigeli, is conservatively regarded as the earliest secure representative of the total clade of Ungaliophiinae, but the history of this clade may stretch considerably further back. The loxocemid, Ogmophis compactus, is only the second reported fossil of that clade. The colubrid is one of the earliest known and could represent the first appearance of colubrine racers in North America; it may have had an elongate tail, but this is not yet statistically clear. Full-column analysis and cranial elements prove crucial for the accurate higher-level identification of snake clades from which these isolated elements derive. The past assignment of most North American Paleogene taxa to Erycinae (sand boas) is further undone in this work; there is no well-founded record of an erycine in North America prior to the Miocene. (C) 2012 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.
作者
我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。
推荐
暂无数据