The fishes of Bukwa, Uganda, a lower Miocene (Burdigalian) locality of East Africa

ABSTRACT

Renewed research at the early Miocene fossil site of Bukwa in northeastern Uganda has resulted in new fossil finds, including fish, with representatives of two families, Cichlidae and Alestidae. Although the two families were previously briefly reported from Bukwa, we here give a more detailed account of the fishes based on newly collected material. The cichlid material, mainly composed of vertebrae, can be tentatively assigned to one or more species of Pseudocrenilabrinae. The alestid material, comprising a diversity of teeth, likely represents several different species of Alestes, Brycinus, and/or Bryconaethiops. Although the ichthyofaunal diversity of Bukwa is low, the fishes are important for indicating the paleoenvironment and hydrographic connections of Bukwa. The early Miocene was a critical time for African faunas, because it was during this time that the Afro-Arabian and Eurasian plates came into contact with one another, ending the long isolation of Africa, which, along with rifting in East Africa, created new terrestrial and hydrological connections allowing faunal interchanges. Bukwa is one of only a few African early Miocene localities known that sample fish and, based on these fish, the site probably represents an area of interconnected lakes and large rivers, including floodplains.

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Citation for this article: Murray, A. M., T. Argyriou, S. Cote, and L. MacLatchy. 2017. The fishes of Bukwa, Uganda, a lower Miocene (Burdigalian) locality of East Africa. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2017.1324460.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank J. Kingston, W. Downs, A. Winkler, R. Kityo, A. Mugume, S. Musalizi, and M. Mafabi for their help in the field. We would also like to thank the entire staff of the Uganda Museum, particularly R. Mwanja and A. Mugume, for research support and access to specimens under their care. W. Downs, A. Winkler, and University of Calgary undergraduate students A. Hall, H. Medrano, E. Henderson, M. Wong, K. O'Keefe, and M. Brubaker helped with wet screening and specimen sorting. Andrew Hill and Alan Walker provided information about the early collections from Bukwa. We also thank two anonymous reviewers, B. Reichenbacher, and editor J. Kriwet for helpful comments that improved the manuscript. This research was supported by research grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Leakey Foundation, and the National Science Foundation (BCS 0215877, BCS 0456589, BCS 1208369, and BCS 1241811 to L.M.; BCS 0524944 to S.C.), and by the Departments of Anthropology at Boston University and the University of Michigan and the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary. This research is part of the NSF-funded REACHE Project (Research on East African Catarrhine and Hominoid Evolution) and is REACHE publication no. 5.