Panthera balamoides and other Pleistocene felids from the submerged caves of Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico

ABSTRACT

Here we describe a new species of a Pleistocene felid based on the distal third of a right humerus from the submerged El Pit cenote (sinkhole) near Tulum in Quintana Roo, Mexico. The new taxon, Panthera balamoides sp. nov., is characterized by a large entepicondylar foramen, a gracile and straight humeral shaft with a prominent supracondylar ridge with a small depression on the lateral epicondyle and a distal articular surface located medially with respect to the long axis of the shaft.

Two felid clavicles from the same locality have been assigned to Panthera atrox, while a humerus fragment from the Kim Ha cave near Tulum likely corresponds to Smilodon gracilis. Panthera balamoides lines up with other likely endemic mammals in the region, which suggest that at least northern Quintana Roo, if not the entire Yucatán peninsula, may have been ecologically isolated during the Pleistocene, due to the repeated expansion of grassland.

KEYWORDS:

• Pleistocene
• megafauna
• Mexico
• felids

Acknowledgments

Identification and registration of submerged prehistoric caves in Quintana Roo, Mexico, was only possible due to the great support of local cave divers like Ernesto Ruiz, Vicente Fito, Alvaro Gari, Luis and Marina Leal. We would also like to thank Grupo Experiencias Xcaret for their support and Ben McGeever from DiveXtras for his sponsorship. Without their collaboration and dedicated participation in our work, this research would not have been possible. We also thank the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) centro Quintana Roo, that supported the project “Estudios de los grupos humanos preceramicos de la costa oriental de Quintana Roo, México, a través de los contextos actualmente inundados”.

We would like to thank the American Museum of Natural History in New York, especially Mrs. Judy Galkin, for allowing SRS to study and photograph several fossils. We are also grateful to the University of Tübingen and Dr. Loïc Costeur from the Natural History Museum in Basel for their support and collaboration regarding fossil material for comparison.

We are grateful to one anonymous reviewer, Dr. Francisco Vega and editor Dr. Gareth Dyke for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung [BMBF 01DN119,01DN15030]; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [DFG FR 1314/26-1, STI 128/28-1]; Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst [DAAD-Kurzreisestipendium für Doktoranden 91683941].