Gangaroo

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 : 336

† Gangaroo

SPECIES SCORED: † Gangaroo bilamina (type species), † G. bites, † G. robustiter .

GEOLOGICAL PROVENANCE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Riversleigh Faunal zones B and C, Riversleigh World Heritage Area, Queensland, Australia.

AGE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Riversleigh Faunal zones B and C are interpreted to be early Miocene and middle Miocene respectively, based on biostratigraphy (see above). In the absence of radiometric dates, we have assumed the entire span of the early and middle Miocene (Aquitanian to Serravallian; Cohen et al., 2013 [updated]) for this terminal.

ASSIGNED AGE RANGE: 23.030 –11.630 Mya.

REMARKS: Cooke (1997a) described † Gangaroo bilamina based on isolated mandibles from several sites in Riversleigh Faunal Zone B and referred this taxon to the macropodiform subfamily †Bulungamayinae, which was erected by Flannery et al. (1983) and placed by those authors within Potoroidae . Subsequent studies have suggested that † Gangaroo and other “bulungamayines” are not in fact potoroids, but instead likely form a paraphyletic assemblage at the base of Macropodidae (Cooke, 1997a, 1997b, 2006; Cooke and Kear, 1999; Kear and Cooke, 2001; Prideaux, 2004; Kear et al., 2007; Kear and Pledge, 2008; Prideaux and Warburton, 2010; Black et al., 2014c; Phillips, 2015; Travouillon et al., 2014b, 2015a, 2016; Cooke et al., 2015; Butler et al., 2016, 2018; den Boer and Kear, 2018: supplemental data; Cascini et al., 2019).

Well-preserved craniodental material of † Ganguroo bilamina is known from Riversleigh Faunal Zone B sites (Cooke, 1997b; Travouillon et al., 2014b), with a second species, † G. robustiter , known from Riversleigh Faunal zones C and D (Cooke et al., 2015). A third species, † G. bites, is known only from lower jaw material from Faunal Zone B (Travouillon et al., 2014b). Specimens of all three species were used to code this terminal, but we only examined the Riversleigh Faunal Zone C specimens of † G. robustiter , so we restrict the assigned age range of our † Ganguroo terminal to early to middle Miocene (see above).