A new presbyornithid bird (Aves, Anseriformes) from the Late Cretaceous of Southern Mongolia

Kurochkin, E.N., Dyke, Gareth J. and Karhu, A.A. (2002) A new presbyornithid bird (Aves, Anseriformes) from the Late Cretaceous of Southern Mongolia. American Museum Novitates, 3386, 1-11.

Abstract

We describe a new large representative of the important fossil anseriform taxon Presbyornithidae from the latest Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) Nemegt Formation of southern Mongolia. This new taxon, Teviornis gobiensis, n. gen. et n. sp., is known from the associated manual portion of a right wing and the distal end of a right humerus, but is clearly diagnosable with respect to all other known representatives of the fossil Presbyornithidae. It is placed within the clades Anseriformes and Presbyornithidae, respectively, on the basis of a number of derived characters of the carpometacarpus and digits. Importantly, description of Teviornis confirms the presence of members of the neornithine clade Anseriformes (“waterfowl”) in the Late Cretaceous, as has been suggested previously on the basis of much less diagnostic fossil material as well as from clade divergence estimates founded on molecular sequence data. The extinct Presbyornithidae thus has a worldwide distribution and ranged in age from at least the Maastrichtian through to the uppermost Eocene.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Download statistics