Abstract
Surface finds of small mammal fossils tend to be large body-size species; small species are retrieved more readily by applying special collecting techniques. The bias against small fossil recovery from Yushe Basin was greatly diminished by screen washing, beginning in 1987. Prior to that time, the historical monographic study by Teilhard de Chardin on the rodents of Yushe Basin focused on relatively large body-size species, especially beavers and zokors . Two other large kinds of rodents, bamboo rats and porcupines, were known to Teilhard and are reviewed here. Of these, the bamboo rats include Brachyrhizomys shansius Teilhard de Chardin, 1942 named for fossils from the Pliocene of Yushe, and a smaller late Miocene bamboo rat recovered by the Sino-American collaborative field team in 1991. This species is the oldest rhizomyine in North China, and the oldest species assignable to the extant Rhizomys group. Specimens representing the Old World porcupine Hystrix have stratigraphic importance, with a higher crowned species replacing Hystrix gansuensis by the early Pleistocene.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the curators of the Tianjin Natural History Museum and the American Museum of Natural History for access to collections made in the early part of the last century. These are crucial to understanding the relationships of both the bamboo rats and the porcupines of Yushe Basin. Our visit to Tianjin on September 1, 1988, introduced us to a number of Yushe Basin specimens; photographs by Will Downs are the basis for Fig. 15.2. We appreciate the suggestions for improvements by reviewers Sevket Sen, Rajeev Patnaik and Louis Jacobs.
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Flynn, L.J., Wu, WY. (2017). The Bamboo Rats and Porcupines of Yushe Basin. In: J. Flynn, L., Wu, WY. (eds) Late Cenozoic Yushe Basin, Shanxi Province, China: Geology and Fossil Mammals. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1050-1_15
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