Warendja wakefieldi, Hope & Wilkinson, 1982

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 : 328

† Warendja

SPECIES SCORED: † Warendja wakefieldi (type species).

GEOLOGICAL PROVENANCE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: McEacherns Cave, Victoria, Australia; Comaum Forest Cave, South Australia, Australia; Wombeyan Caves, New South Wales, Australia.

AGE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: The deposits containing specimens of † Warendja wakefieldi at McEacherns Cave, Comaum Forest Cave, and Wombeyan Caves are all estimated to be Pleistocene based on faunal composition (Hope and Wilkinson, 1982; Lundelius, 1983; Flannery and Pledge, 1987). We have assigned an age range of the entire Pleistocene (Cohen et al., 2013 [updated]) to this terminal.

ASSIGNED AGE RANGE: 2.580 –0.012 Mya.

REMARKS: † Warendja wakefieldi was originally described based on two mandibles and six isolated teeth from McEacherns Cave, Victoria (Hope and Wilkinson, 1982). These specimens preserve characteristic vombatid apomorphies, most notably open-rooted (hypselodont) molars, but nevertheless appear distinctly more plesiomorphic than those of other known vombatids. Additional cranial material and teeth were subsequently recovered from Comaum Forest Cave, South Australia (Flannery and Pledge, 1987; Pledge, 1992), enabling reconstruction of a partial cranium (Pledge, 1992). Based on these specimens, the cranial morphology of † W. wakefieldi appears markedly more gracile than that of living vombatids (Pledge, 1992; Murray, 1998). Brewer (2007) described additional specimens of † W. wakefieldi from Wombeyan Caves, New South Wales, and we used her description to score some characters for this terminal. Brewer et al. (2007) described another species († W. encorensis ) based on fragmentary dental remains from the Riversleigh Faunal Zone D (?late Miocene) Encore Site at Riversleigh, but we did not use those specimens for scoring purposes.