Eucyon minor

Canis chihliensis var. minor Teilhard de Chardin & Piveteau, 1939; see Rook 1993; Tedford & Qiu 1996.

TYPE LOCALITY. — Nihewan (China).

AGE. — Late Pliocene; Haiyan Fm. correlative, early Matuyama.

GEOGRAPHIC RANGE. — China, Mongolia, Transbaikalia.

This is a relatively late Eucyon species known from the “Villafranchian” (Nihewanian) of China (the deposits from Nihewan of Teilhard de Chardin & Piveteau (1930) are correlative with the Haiyan Fm. of the Yushe Basin, dated by magnetostratigraphy to the early Matuyama; Flynn et al. 1991; R. H. Tedford pers. comm. in Rook 1993). Other specimens of E. cf. minor from the late Pliocene of Mongolia (Rook 1993) are kept within the collections of the Institute of Geology in Moscow (GIN), from three Pliocene sites (MN 16, early Villafranchian; Pevzner et al. 1982; Vislobokova et al. 2001): Shamar, Beregovaja and Udunga (Fig. 2).

The specimen from Udunga has been described by Sotnikova & Kalmykov (1991) as Canis sp. The samples from Shamar and Beregovaja have been listed by Kurtén (1974) as coyote-like dogs. The lower carnassial morphology of the Shamar and Beregovaja specimens have the typical characteristics of the genus Eucyon. Rook (1993), on the basis of dental morphology and the similarities with E. minor from China, attributed this material to E. cf. minor. More recently, Sotnikova (2004) proposed the same taxonomic placement for the larger of the two Shamar mandibles, but suggested an attribution to a new species for the smaller one. An attribution of the Shamar and Beregovaja specimens to E. cf. minor has been also suggested by R. H. Tedford (pers. comm. in Spassov & Rook 2007).