Palaeothentidae ( Sinclair, 1906 )

Beck, Robin M. D., Voss, Robert S. & Jansa, Sharon A., 2022, Craniodental Morphology And Phylogeny Of Marsupials, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2022 (457), pp. 1-353 : 203

† Palaeothentidae ( Sinclair, 1906)

CONTENTS: † Acdestis and † Palaeothentes .

STEM AGE: 27.4 Mya (95% HPD: 21.3–34.7 Mya).

CROWN AGE: 19.8 Mya (95% HPD: 15.3–25.8 Mya).

UNAMBIGUOUS CRANIODENTAL SYNAPOMORPHIES: Cristid obliqua of m1 contacts metaconid (char. 169: 1→0; ci = 0.250).

COMMENTS: † Acdestis and † Palaeothentes have been included in our analysis as the two palaeothentids currently best represented by craniodental material ( Sinclair, 1906; Marshall, 1980; Goin et al., 2003; Abello, 2007; Forasiepi et al., 2014b; Engelman and Croft, 2016). Monophyly of Palaeothentidae has been consistently supported in published phylogenetic analyses ( Goin et al., 2007b, 2009a; Abello, 2013; Forasiepi et al., 2013; Rincón et al., 2015; Engelman et al., 2016; Abello et al., 2020, 2021), but our late Oligocene-early Miocene estimate for the divergence between † Acdestis and † Palaeothentes is considerably younger than the ~31 Mya estimate for this event in the a posteriori time-scaled phylogeny of Abello et al. (2020: fig. 2).