Honanotherium

Honanotherium is a genus of extinct giraffid from the late Miocene of Henan Province, China, and East Azerbaijan Province, northwestern Iran.[2][1] It was closely related to Bohlinia and was once thought to be ancestral to the modern giraffe (genus Giraffa). The living animal would have resembled a modern giraffe, but was somewhat shorter, with more massive ossicones.

Honanotherium
Temporal range: Late Miocene
skull
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Artiodactyla
Family: Giraffidae
Genus: †Honanotherium
Bohlin, 1927
Species
  • H. schlosseri Bohlin, 1927
  • H. bernori Solounias & Danowitz, 2016[1]

The first part of the generic name, honano refers to the Henan (Chinese: 河南; pinyin: Húnán) province of China, where the first specimens were recovered. the second part, therium, comes from the Greek, θηρίον which means "beast."

Paleobiology
reconstruction

Like the modern-day giraffe, Honanotherium may have grazed on low-lying trees in the savannah environment, although its shorter neck shows that it probably fed on different plants than the extant giraffe.

gollark: systemd has great built-in features like user management, allegedly an HTTP server, and datetime synchronization!
gollark: ddg! void star linux
gollark: ddg! void star
gollark: What if we just make there be multiple 5s, to resolve the issue?
gollark: Why do you even have indentation instead of just prepending random quantities of random Unicode whitespace to each line?

References
  1. Nikos Solounias and Melinda Danowitz (2016). "The Giraffidae of Maragheh and the identification of a new species of Honanotherium". Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments. in press. doi:10.1007/s12549-016-0230-7.
  2. Bohlin, B. 1927. Die Familie Giraffidae. Pal. Sinica, Ser. C, IV, Fasc. 1, various pages.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.