First discovery of Megantereon skull from southern China

ABSTRACT

The sabertoothed cat Megantereon is an iconic carnivore in the Pleistocene of Eurasia, yet its fossil record is extremely rare and highly fragmentary in southern China (and the whole Oriental Realm). Here we report a nearly complete and undeformed skull of Megantereon from Sabretooth Cave, Chongzuo, southernmost China, middle Early Pleistocene. The general morphology allows us to assign it to Megantereon nihowanensis, differing from the northern China population of M. nihowanensis by better developed P4 parastyle and longer c-p3 diastema. The excellent preservation allows us to exam the previous unrecognised cranial characters. Megantereon shows a clear affinity to Smilodon in many aspects, e.g. wide nasal with parallel lateral border and smoothly curved posterior border, presence of moderately developed antero-medial process of the nasal, presence of anterior accessory process of the frontal, and a distinct frontal depression behind the posterior border of the nasal. These characters are markedly different from those of Homotherium, suggesting a deep divergence of the two lineages of sabertoothed cats. The rarity of Megantereon in southern China and southeastern Asia probably suggests this genus is not well adaptive to the closed forest environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Megantereon
• southern China
• pleistocene
• smilodontini

Acknowledgments

We thank J. Meng, R. O’Leary and J. Galkin for their help in accessing the AMNH fossil mammal collections; M. Surovy, E. Hoeger and S. Ketelsen for their help in accessing the AMNH modern mammal collections; and Z. Qiu and J. Chen for help in accessing fossil collections of the IVPP. We thank to review for their excellent suggestion, which greatly improve the quality of this work. The current work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant Nos. XDB26000000 and XDA20070203), Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province (Grant No. D2018403098), Key Frontier Science Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant Nos. QYZDY-SSW-DQC-22 and GJHZ1885), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41430102, 41872001, 41702001 and 41772018), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and Development Support project for Young Faculty of School of History at Beijing Normal University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences [XDB26000000 and XDA20070203]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [41430102, 41872001, 41702001 and 41772018]; Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province [D2018403098]; Key Frontier Science Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences [QYZDY-SSW-DQC-22 and GJHZ1885].