Priscileo
| Priscileo | ||||||||||||
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| late Oligocene to early Miocene | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Priscileo | ||||||||||||
| Rauscher , 1987 | ||||||||||||
Priscileo is a genus of marsupial lions from the late Oligocene to early Miocene.
features
Priscileo reached the size of today's house cat and had a calculated weight of about 2.7 kg. This made him one of the smallest robberies in Australia. Is known priscileo of only a few fossils, including a nearly complete skull and some more bone fragments and isolated teeth. The skull ( holotype copy number QMF 23453) itself was only a little longer than 8.3 cm, but very bulging at the zygomatic arches . In the upper jaw there was a dentition typical of bag mammals with three incisors , one canine , three premolars and four molars per jaw branch, but only the right and left last premolars and the first two molars were actually preserved in the preserved skull, the rest of them could be found on the individual alveoli can be determined. Among the incisors, the first was the largest, the second the smallest, the canine was almost the size of the first incisor, but is separated from the anterior and posterior teeth by a diastema each (all determined from the alveoli). The largest tooth in the dentition was the last premolar with a length of 11 mm; the molars became smaller and smaller towards the back.
Paleobiology
The carnivorous Priscileo was an extremely adapted predator and probably lived in trees ( arboreal ). According to studies of the teeth, he had enormous biting force in relation to his body weight. This was determined in comparison to 38 other predator taxa and is based on the ratio of the size of the skull to the thickness of the masticatory muscles on the lower jaw of today's predators in relation to the development of the bony lower jaw. The resulting bite force quotient , determined by the position of the canine teeth, relates to the statistical center of 100. Priscileo achieved a quotient of 196, the highest of all taxa examined, which corresponds to an actual bite force of 184 newtons . Comparably high was only the quotient of the also extinct predator Thylacoleo with 194, which however weighed an average of 109 kg and could raise 1.69 kN . A today's lion achieves less than 60% of the strength of Priscileo with a bite force quotient of 112 , but has almost ten times that with the actual bite force of 1.77 kN. The quotient of the tiger is 127 (1.52 kN), that of the jaguar is higher at 137 (1.01 kN). A dingo as today's modern Australian predator has a bite force quotient of 108 (303 N), the peak value among recent predators is held by the marsupial devil with 181 (408 N). Thylacosmilus , on the other hand, had the lowest, at 41, a fossil predator species from Australia, which occupied the niche of saber-toothed cats . These also have extremely low quotients. The bite force quotient shows that Priscileo may have been able to kill prey animals that were much larger than his body size.
Systematics
The closest relative of Priscileo is Wakaleo , who forms the sister group together with Thylacoleo , but both have much more modern features within the marsupial mammals due to the reduction of the last molar. Occasionally Priscileo is placed together with Thylacoleo in the subfamily of the Thylacoleoninae, which is distinguished from the subfamily Wakaleoninae by the non-reduced first premolar. From priscileo two are types known: priscileo pitikantensis Rauscher, 1987, lived in the Late Oligocene and Ngapakaldi-local fauna belongs in South Australia , but only by an upper jaw fragment, some teeth and light postcraniales handed skeletal material. Priscileo roskellyae Gillespie, 1997, to whom the complete skull can be assigned, lived in the early Miocene and is a member of the Upper Side local fauna of Riversleigh. However, the genus was replaced by larger forms such as Wakaleo in the middle Miocene . The name Priscileo is derived from the Latin word priscus ("old") and the name leo for "lion".
literature
- Long, Archer, Flannery, Hand: Prehistoric Mammals of Australia and New Guinea, one hundred million years of evolution. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore / London 2002, ISBN 0-8018-7223-5 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Stephen Wroe, Colin McHenr and Jeffrey Thomason: Bite club: comparative bite force in big biting mammals and the prediction of predatory behavior in fossil taxa. In: Proceeding of the Royal Society. B, 2005, pp. 1-7, doi: 10.1098 / rspb.2004.2986 .
- ↑ a b Anna Gillespie: Priscileo roskellyae sp. nov. (Thylacoleonidae, Marsupialia) from the Oligocene-Miocene of Riversleigh, northwestern Queensland. In: Memoirs of The Queensland Museum. 41, 1997, pp. 321-327.
- ^ Karen H. Black, Michael Archer, Suzanne J. Hand, and Henk Godthelp: The Rise of Australian Marsupials : A Synopsis of Biostratigraphic, Phylogenetic, Palaeoecologic and Palaeobiogeographic Understanding. In: JA Talent (Ed.): Earth and Life. International Year of Planet Earth 983, 2012, pp. 983-1078, doi : 10.1007 / 978-90-481-3428-1_35 .