Eucyon cipio ( Crusafont Pairó, 1950 )

Rook, Lorenzo, 2009, The wide ranging genus Eucyon Tedford & Qiu, 1996 (Mammalia, Carnivora, Canidae, Canini) in the Mio-Pliocene of the Old World, Geodiversitas 31 (4), pp. 723-741 : 730

Eucyon cipio ( Crusafont Pairó, 1950)

TYPE LOCALITY. — Concud ( Spain).

AGE. — Late Miocene (Turolian; MN 12).

GEOGRAPHIC RANGE. — Teruel basin ( Spain). The species was the first canine to be documented in the fossil record of the Old World ( Crusafont Pairó 1950). Known from the late Turolian (MN 12) of Spain, it has been regarded for long time as a member of the genus Canis “ sensu stricto ” ( Crusafont Pairó 1950; Pons Moyá & Crusafont Pairó 1978; Alcalá Martínez 1994) but an attribution to the genus Canis was later questioned by Rook et al. (1991) Torre et al. (1992) and Rook (1992, 1993).

Eucyon cipio is represented by the type specimen (a right maxillary bone bearing P3-M2) from Concud ( Crusafont Pairó 1950; Pons Moyá & Crusafont Pairó 1978) and by an isolated right lower carnassial (M 1) from Los Mansuetos ( Alcalá Martínez 1994).

The dental morphology for both upper dentition (P4 with a small protocone, anteriolingually oriented and extended; lingual cingulum in M 1 ending at the level of metacone; M2 relatively large) and lower tooth (M 1 talonid lacking a transverse cristid between hypoconid and entoconid), is primitive and suggestive of a taxon at an early stage of evolution before the differentiation of the genus Canis . As a matter of fact E. cipio predates the first occurrence of the true genus Canis in North America and is roughly contemporary to the Eucyon first occurrence in North America ( Wang & Tedford 2007, 2008).