Río Las Piedras (Miocene of Peru)

Where: Madre de Dios, Peru (12.1° S, 69.7° W: paleocoordinates 12.3° S, 67.9° W)

• coordinate estimated from map

• small collection-level geographic resolution

When: Madre de Dios Formation, Late/Upper Miocene (11.6 - 5.3 Ma)

• Boivin et al. 2019: The concerned mandible (MHNC-MS-001) was found floating on a bank of the Río Las Piedras, in the vicinity of the Monte Salvado Native Community (Fig. 1). It is therefore difficult to ascertain the stratigraphic age of this specimen. Nevertheless, it may have originated from the upper Miocene–Pliocene Madre de Dios Formation, which crops out extensively around the river beds in that area (Romero Pittman et al. 1998; Campbell et al. 2001; Roddaz et al. 2010).

Environment/lithology: "floodplain"; limestone

• Boivin et al. 2019: The matrix of MHNC-MS-001 was a beige marly limestone, compatible with a lacustrine floodplain depositional environment. That lithological facies matches perfectly the lowermost horizons of the Madre de Dios Formation (“Unit A”; light grey to beige shale and limestone lenses, with pedogenetic calcareous nodules; Romero Pittman et al. 1998: 54, fig. 4) overlying the so-called Acre Conglomerate (Campbell et al. 2001).

Size class: macrofossils

Collection methods: Boivin et al. 2019: MHNC-MS-001 stored in Museo de Historia Natural de la Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco, Cusco, Peru

Primary reference: M. Boivin, A. Pierre-Olivier, A. Benites-Palomino, L. Marivaux, and R. Salas-Gismondi. 2019. A new record of a giant neoepiblemid rodent from Peruvian Amazonia and an overview of lower tooth dental homologies among chinchilloids. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 64 [P. Mannion/G. Varnham]more details

Purpose of describing collection: taxonomic analysis

PaleoDB collection 202649: authorized by Philip Mannion, entered by Grace Varnham on 17.07.2019

Creative Commons license: CC BY (attribution)

Taxonomic list

Show authors, comments, and common names
Mammalia
 Rodentia - Neoepiblemidae
Phoberomys sp.
Phoberomys sp. Kraglievich 1926 caviomorph
MHNC-MS-001