Bulungu palara, Gurovich, Travouillon, Beck, Muirhead & Archer, 2013

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 : 325

† Bulungu

SPECIES SCORED: † Bulungu palara (type species).

GEOLOGICAL PROVENANCE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Lee Sye’s Outlook (LSO) Site (Riversleigh Faunal Zone A), Boid Site East, Camel Sputum, Dirk’s Towers, Inabeyance, Judith’s Horizontalis, Mike’s Potato Patch, Neville’s Garden, Outasite, Price Is Right, Quantum Leap, Rat Vomit, RSO, Upper, and Wayne’s Wok sites (Riversleigh Faunal Zone B); and AL90, Gag, Gotham City, Henk’s Hollow, Rick’s Sausage, Ringtail, Two Trees, and Wang sites (Riversleigh Faunal Zone C), Riversleigh World Heritage Area, Queensland, Australia.

AGE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Riversleigh Faunal zones A, B, and C are interpreted to be late Oligocene, early Miocene, and middle Miocene, respectively, based on biostratigraphy (see previous accounts above). Radiometric dates from Woodhead et al. (Woodhead et al., 2014) are 16.97–18.53 Mya for Camel Sputum Site, 17.72– 18.53 Mya for Neville’s Garden Site, 17.76–18.26 Mya for Outasite, 16.24–16.86 Mya for RSO Site, 14.17–15.11 Mya for AL90 Site, and 14.23–12.89 Mya for Ringtail Site, but the other sites lack dates, so we have conservatively assumed the entire span of the late Oligocene to middle Miocene (Chattian to Serravallian; Cohen et al., 2013 [updated]) for this taxon.

ASSIGNED AGE RANGE: 27.820 –11.630 Mya.

REMARKS: Gurovich et al. (2014) described a single well-preserved skull of † Bulungu palara (QM F23437) from Upper Site at Riversleigh and they also referred additional fragmentary specimens from multiple other sites spanning Riversleigh Faunal zones A, B, and C to this taxon. Gurovich et al. (2014) additionally referred two specimens from the?early-middle Miocene Leaf Locality of the Kutjamarpu Local Fauna in the Wipajiri Formation of South Australia (see † Barinya above) to † B. palara , but we did not examine these for scoring character data. Travouillon et al. (2013a) described an additional two species of † Bulungu from the Etadunna Formation of South Australia († B. muirheadae , from the Ditjimanka Local Fauna, and † B. campbelli , from the Ngapakaldi Local Fauna), which we likewise did not use for scoring characters. Based on QM F23437, † B. palara differs from all Recent peramelemorphians in exhibiting a number of putatively plesiomorphic craniodental features, such as alisphenoid-parietal (rather than frontal-squamosal) contact on the lateral wall of the braincase, and nasals that extend posteriorly beyond the anterior margin of the orbits (Gurovich et al., 2014). It consistently falls outside the peramelemorphian crown-clade (= Perameloidea) in published phylogenetic analyses (Travouillon et al., 2013a, 2014a, 2015b, 2017, 2019; Gurovich et al., 2014; Chamberlain et al., 2015; Kear et al., 2016; Travouillon and Phillips, 2018).