Status Of North American Gomphotherium

[DD1991]

Has there been any latest word on the systematics of gomphotheriine gomphotheres from North America? As far as I know, Shoshani et al. (2006) list Serridentinus as separate from Gomphotherium in their cladistic analysis of Eritreum, and I've also read that the Gomphotherium from New Mexico could represent multiple species (Heckert et al. 2000), and that Lambert and Shoshani list some North American gomphotheres synonymized with Gomphotherium by Tobien (1973) as distinct from Gomphotherium (e.g. Gnathabelodon, Eubelodon, Megabelodon).

Heckert, A.B., S.G. Lucas and G.S. Morgan (2000). Specimens of Gomphotherium in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and the Species-Level Taxonomy of North American Gomphotherium. In: New Mexico's Fossil Record 2, Lucas, S.G. (ed.). New Mexico Museum of Nature and Science, Bulletin Number 16.

Lambert, W. D., and J. Shoshani, 1998. The Proboscidea. In Janis, C., K. M. Scott, and L. Jacobs (eds.), Evolution of Tertiary Mammals of North America, Volume 1. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK.

J. Shoshani, R. C. Walter, M. Abraha, S. Berhe, P. Tassy, W. J. Sanders, G. H. Marchant, Y. Libsekal, T. Ghirmai and D. Zinner. 2006. A proboscidean from the late Oligocene of Eritrea, a ‘‘missing link’’ between early Elephantiformes and Elephantimorpha, and biogeographic implications. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103(46):17296-17301

[Diceros]

So far as I recall, Serridentinus is just a more derived genus than Gomphotherium - both are still valid.

In America, the latter is just found in the m. Miocene (Barstovian N.A. Land Mammal age), when proboscidians first got here from Asia. I think they got to Europe from Africa only a little earlier. Those thick-skinned fellows really got around!

[DD1991]

On 5/25/2015 at 11:56 AM, Diceros said:

So far as I recall, Serridentinus is just a more derived genus than Gomphotherium - both are still valid.

In America, the latter is just found in the m. Miocene (Barstovian N.A. Land Mammal age), when proboscidians first got here from Asia. I think they got to Europe from Africa only a little earlier. Those thick-skinned fellows really got around!

A careful check by me of the paper by Shoshani et al. (2006) describing Eritreum reveals that the phylogenetic data matrix for the Eritreum paper is the only section of this paper where the authors list Serridentinus as separate from Gomphotherium, but the authors don't mention the North American remains assigned to Gomphotherium in the text of the Eritreum paper. Although a 1986 dissertation by Jeheskel Shoshani listed Serridentinus as a distinct genus in contrast to the paper by Tobien (1973) synonymizing   Serridentinus by Gomphotherium, a paper by Lucas (2018) which regards the type species of the nominal genus Tatabelodon (T. riograndensis) as a Gomphotherium species distinct from G. productum follows the majority of authors in treating Serridentinus as a junior synonym of Gomphotherium for convenience. Recent papers by Li et al. (2023) and Wang et al. (2023) remove Gomphotherium connexum and G. wimani from Gomphotherium and reassign them to Choerolophodontidae and Amebelodontidae respectively, and given that a cladistic analysis by Wang et al. (2017) recovers Gomphotherium productum in a different clade within Gomphotherium than the Gomphotherium type species yet does not include any Pleistocene gomphotheriids from the Americas, it is possible that future study may lead to Serridentinus being resurrected for both G. productum and some Middle-Late Miocene Eurasian Gomphotherium species more closely related to Pleistocene gomphotheriids from North and South America because G. productum is the type species of Serridentinus.

 

Li, C.-X., Chen, J., and Wang, S.-Q., 2023. Reassessment of Trilophodon connexus Hopwood, 1935 and attributing it to the Choerolophodontidae. Vertebrata PalAsiatica  doi:10.19615/j.cnki.2096-9899.230917.

 

Lucas, S.G., 2018. Re-evaluation of the proboscidean Tatabelodon from the Miocene of northern New Mexico. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 79: 485–488. (PDF available at ResearchGate)

 

Wang, S.-Q., Li, Y., Duangkrayom, J., Yang, X.-W., He, W., and Chen, S.-Q., 2017. A new species of Gomphotherium (Proboscidea, Mammalia) from China and the evolution of Gomphotherium in Eurasia. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 37 (3): e1318284. doi:10.1080/02724634.2017.1318284. 

 

Wang, S.-Q., Li, C., Li, Y., and Zhang, X., 2023. Gomphotheres from Linxia Basin, China, and their significance in biostratigraphy, biochronology, and paleozoogeography. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 613. 111405. doi:10.1016/j.palaeo.2023.111405.