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[[Category:Reptiles]]
 
[[Category:Reptiles]]
 
[[Category:Extinct animals of Texas]]
 
[[Category:Extinct animals of Texas]]
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[[Category:Incomplete fossils]]

Revision as of 03:16, 21 January 2021

Chinatichampsus wilsonorum is an extinct genus of extinct crocodyliform, caiman that lived in North America, Texas during the Eocene period around 42 million years ago.

Description

Dramatic early Cenozoic climatic shifts resulted in faunal reorganization on a global scale. Among vertebrates, multiple groups of mammals (e.g. primitive primates, mesonychids, taeniodonts, artiodactyls) are well known from the North America in the warm, greenhouse conditions of the early Eocene, also a dramatic drop in the diversity of these groups, along with the introduction of more dry-tolerant taxa, occurred near the Eocene–Oligocene boundary. Crocodyliforms underwent a striking loss of diversity at this time as well.

Crocodyliform diversity through the intervening Uintan & Duchesnean periods is not understood. The middle Eocene Devil’s Graveyard Formation of southwest Texas provides new data from southern latitudes during that crucial period. A new specimen from the middle member of the late Uintan–Duchesnean is the most complete cranial material of an alligatorid known from Paleogene deposits outside the Western Interior. The specimen officially identified as a caimanine based on notched descending laminae of the pterygoids posterior to the choanae and long descending processes of the exoccipitals that are in contact with the basioccipital tubera. Unlike Eocaiman cavernensis, the anterior palatine process is rounded rather than quadrangular.

The relationships and age of this new taxon support the hypothesis that the modern distribution of caimanines represents a contraction of a more expansive early Cenozoic distribution. The hypothesization is; that the range of caimanines tracked shifting warm, humid climatic conditions that contracted latitudinally toward the hothouse-icehouse transition later in the Eocene. [1]

References