Small artiodactyls with tapir-like teeth from the middle Eocene of the Erlian Basin, Inner Mongolia, China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Artiodactyls diversified during the Eocene and Oligocene in North America and Europe after their first Holarctic appearance at the beginning of the Eocene. However, the relationships among early artiodactyls, European endemic forms, and later derived suiforms, tylopods, and ruminants remain unclear. Early artiodactyls are relatively rare in Asia compared to those known from North America and Europe; thus, investigation of Eocene artiodactyls from Asia is important to resolve these issues. Here we report two new genera and three new species of small early artiodactyls from middle Eocene deposits of the Erlian Basin, Inner Mongolia, China. The new materials represent a morphologically gradational series from Asian Land Mammal Ages Irdinmanhan to Sharamurunian, characterized by a trend towards bilophodonty in the lower molars. Morphologic and phylogenetic analyses suggest that these new taxa have a close relationship with the enigmatic European Tapirulus , which currently consists of five species that range from the middle Eocene to the early Oligocene. The close relationship between the Erlian specimens and Tapirulus suggests possible faunal exchanges between Europe and Asia during the middle Eocene, a view that has been supported by other mammalian groups across the two continents. The evolution of bilophodonty in Tapirulidae and Raoellidae is probably attributable to convergence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".