User:Larrayal/sandbox

Pliohyrax, is a genus of hyracoids (the cavy-like group of animals most closely related to elephants and manatees). It grew to sizes greatly exceeding those of any living hyrax, though it was by no means the largest member of this family.

Fossils of this Miocene-Pliocene, scansorial herbivore have been found in Afghanistan, France, and Turkey. In Spain, Pliohyrax graecus is among the large mammals species found in the Almenara site, deposited during the Messinian salinity crisis, together with Macaca sp., Bovidae indet., cf. Nyctereutes sp., and Felidae indet.

History
In 1853, following a field trip in Cyprus, French palaeontologist and geologist Albert Gaudry stopped in Greece on his way back to France, and, on the invitation of the ambassador of France to Greece Alexandre de Forth-Rouen, visited a local fossil site at Pikermi, in the Attica peninsula, near Athens, first visited by German scientist. Gaudry immediatly recognized the importance of the deposits and led, in 1855 and in 1860, two excavation campaigns in Attica under the commission of the French Academy of Science. In Pikermi, Gaudry excavated the fossils of a diverse fauna whose preservation was almost unprecedented in the Neogene of Europe. Among those discoveries figured two large but isolated mandibles belonging to the same adult individual of a yet unknown large species of mammal. In a seminal book published in 1862, Gaudry described these incomplete remains under the name Leptodon graecus, after the slender shape of its molars. At the time of Gaudry, Hyracoids, Proboscideans, Perissodactyls and Artiodactyls were classified together within the order Pachydermata. Gaudry speculated that Leptodon was an extinct member of a clade including the modern rhinoceros and hyraxes.

The relationship between the Pikermi fossils and modern rhinoceros were however eventually contested, as more fossil localities were explored in Greece, particularly in the island of Samos in the Aegean Sea, and more material whose traits ressembled those of Leptodon were unearthed by German-led expeditions. In 1899, Mark Schlosser and Karl von Zittel, of Munich noted that a specimen found in Samos and storaged in the Stuttgart Natural History Cabinet, temporarily named "Hyrax kruppii" in honour of Friedrich Krupp, who had donated the specimen, to be described in the near future as a new genus of giant hyrax, shared several similarities with Leptodon graecus and with an undescribed specimen from Samos possessed by the Munich Palaeontological Museum. Schlosser and Von Zittel found that those remains, probably too similar to each other to belong to different species, belonged to a yet-unknown fossil group of large hyracoids, more closely related to modern hyraxes than to anything else. The same year, Henry Fairfield Osborn described formally the Stuttgart specimen, a very large fragmentary skull reaching twice the size of that of the largest modern hyrax, as Pliohyrax kruppii, a new type of hyracoid warranting the creation of the eponymous family Pliohyracidae, and the first fossil hyracoid known to science.

Finally, in the United Kingdom, Charles Forsyth Major published two papers regarding the genus ; the first, published in November, synonymyzed Leptodon graecus with Pliohyrax kruppi. Leptodon being already in use for a genus of kite, Pliohyrax was to be kept as the genus name, while at the species level the name graecus, given first, had priority over kruppi. The second article covered the anatomy of a new specimen from Samos, acquired in 1894 by the British Museum, and firstly attributed to a new species of rhinoceros, Rhinoceros pachygnathus, before being reassigned as belonging to Leptodon, now Pliohyrax. The specimen had been artificially altered to make it look more complete, but was nonetheless still complete enough to warrant a complete description, definitely prouving that the four then known specimens belonged to the same genus and possibly the same species, owing their differences to individual rather than interspecific variations.

The 1940s
In the aftermath of the Second World War, high demands in coal to reconstruct France led to the reopening of lignite exploitation near Saint-Martin-du-Mont, in the Soblay locality. There, paleontologists and biologists monitoring the exploitation collected several isolated dental remains, a molar and three premolars, of a new type of animal. In 1947, Jean Viret described several teeth collected by Robert Barone in the locality. Viret constated that the specimens shared several similarities with Postschizotherium, from the Pleistocene of Nihewan, in China, that was, at the time, thought to be a chalicothere. Hence, Viret described the remains as Neoschizotherium, without providing a species name, and thinking that it represented an ancestral form of Postschizotherium. A couple of years later, in 1949, Viret described a second molar which he

=Papers that I need=

=Postschizotherium=

Between 1924 and 1926, Emile Licent, founder and director of the Musée Hoangho Paiho of Tianjin, and his fellow Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin led extensive field work in the Nihewan Basin, collecting a vast diversity of fossils belonging to a then unknown Pleistocene fauna. Those fossils were then formally described by Teilhard de Chardin and Jean Piveteau in 1930, forming the basis of what is today known as the Nihewan Fauna. Among the remains found by Licent in Nihewan figured a first upper left molar and an associated third premolar. Teilhard de Chardin and Piveteau noted that, by their general shape, those teeth shared considerable similarities with those of the chalicotheres, a group of large, clawed perissodactyls also present in Nihewan. However, the differences with known chalicotheres being substantial, Teilhard de Chardin and Piveteau concluded that those remains represented a new genus of chalicothere.

In 1932, following this identification, Gustav von Koenigswald redescribed those remains as the new genus and species Postschizotherium chardini. In 1933, Teilhard de Chardin and Pei Wenzhong tentatively refered a lower molar discovered in the Locality 12 of Choukoutien, near Beijing, to the genus. In 1936, Teilhard de Chardin and Licent described additional material referable to Postschizotherium sp., the anterior parts of a mandible and a maxilla belonging to the same individual, discovered in the Yushe Basin in Shanxi ; they noted that Postschizotherium represented an abherrant type of chalicothere. In 1939, Teilhard de Chardin described two additional anterior parts of the mandible discovered by Licent and Trassaert in the same Pliocene-aged deposits in Shanxi that had yielded the first mandible. He considered that all three specimens represented different species, firstly differentiated by their size, one much larger, the other much smaller than the jaw described in 1936. The exact zoological affinities still puzzled Teilhard de Chardin ; the discovery of postcranial chalicothere material in Nihewan seemed to support his previous assumption, while George Gaylord Simpson noted that the teeth shared similarities with those of hyracoids, and Edwin H. Colbert proposed an affinity with the palaeotheres, based on the shape of the molars.

Second map proof of concept
a