The Gansu mole (''Scapanulus oweni'') is a species of

mammal Mammals () are a group of vertebrate animals constituting the class Mammalia (), characterized by the presence of mammary glands which in females produce milk for feeding (nursing) their young, a neocortex (a region of the brain), fur or ...

in the family

Talpidae The family Talpidae () includes the moles (some of whom are called shrew moles and desmans) who are small insectivorous mammals of the order Eulipotyphla. Talpids are all digging animals to various degrees: moles are completely subterranean a ...

endemic Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found elsew ...

to central

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

, where it occurs in

Shaanxi Shaanxi (alternatively Shensi, see #Name, § Name) is a landlocked Provinces of China, province of China. Officially part of Northwest China, it borders the province-level divisions of Shanxi (NE, E), Henan (E), Hubei (SE), Chongqing (S), Sichu ...

Gansu Gansu (, ; alternately romanized as Kansu) is a province in Northwest China. Its capital and largest city is Lanzhou, in the southeast part of the province. The seventh-largest administrative district by area at , Gansu lies between the Tibet ...

Sichuan Sichuan (; zh, c=, labels=no, ; zh, p=Sìchuān; alternatively romanized as Szechuan or Szechwan; formerly also referred to as "West China" or "Western China" by Protestant missions) is a province in Southwest China occupying most of the ...

, and

Qinghai Qinghai (; alternately romanized as Tsinghai, Ch'inghai), also known as Kokonor, is a landlocked province in the northwest of the People's Republic of China. It is the fourth largest province of China by area and has the third smallest po ...

. It is the only species in the genus ''Scapanulus''. Along with the

Medog mole The Medog mole (''Alpiscaptulus medogensis'') is a species of mammal in the family Talpidae. It is the only member of the genus ''Alpiscaptulus''. It is endemic to Tibet, where it is only found in the vicinity of Namcha Barwa in Medog County. ...

(''Alpiscaptulus medogensis''), which is also found in the mountains of China, the Gansu mole is the only member of the

tribe The term tribe is used in many different contexts to refer to a category of human social group. The predominant worldwide usage of the term in English language, English is in the discipline of anthropology. This definition is contested, in p ...

Scalopini The Scalopini are a tribe of moles belonging to the family Talpidae. They include all the New World moles apart from the strikingly distinctive star-nosed mole. As the similarity of the names implies, they are the standard form of the Scalopinae ...

to not live in

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...

. Phylogenetic and fossil evidence indicates that the scalopine moles evolved in

Eurasia Eurasia (, ) is the largest continental area on Earth, comprising all of Europe and Asia. Primarily in the Northern and Eastern Hemispheres, it spans from the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula in the west to the Japanese archipelago a ...

and migrated to North America during the

Neogene The Neogene ( ), informally Upper Tertiary or Late Tertiary, is a geologic period and system that spans 20.45 million years from the end of the Paleogene Period million years ago ( Mya) to the beginning of the present Quaternary Period Mya. ...

; however, the Gansu and Medog moles are not relict Eurasian scalopine moles, but are descendants of North American scalopine moles that migrated back to Eurasia; the

hairy-tailed mole The hairy-tailed mole (''Parascalops breweri''), also known as Brewer's mole, is a medium-sized North American mole. It is the only member of the genus ''Parascalops''. The species epithet ''breweri'' refers to Thomas Mayo Brewer, an American ...

(''Parascalops breweri'') of North America is more closely related to them than it is to the other two North American scalopine genera. Phylogenetic evidence supports the Gansu and Medog moles being the closest living relatives of one another and diverging the mid-late

Miocene The Miocene ( ) is the first geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about (Ma). The Miocene was named by Scottish geologist Charles Lyell; the name comes from the Greek words (', "less") and (', "new") and means "less recen ...

, about 11.59 million years ago. It is thought that the uplift of the

Tibetan Plateau The Tibetan Plateau (, also known as the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau or the Qing–Zang Plateau () or as the Himalayan Plateau in India, is a vast elevated plateau located at the intersection of Central, South and East Asia covering most of the Ti ...

and the subsequent

climate change In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...

isolated the two genera in different habitats, leading to their divergence. The habitats for both species may have served as refugia during periods of

glaciation A glacial period (alternatively glacial or glaciation) is an interval of time (thousands of years) within an ice age that is marked by colder temperatures and glacier advances. Interglacials, on the other hand, are periods of warmer climate betw ...

, allowing them to persist while most other Eurasian scalopines went extinct.

References

The morphology of the Gansu mole indicates that it will fall in the Scalopini tribe. All scolopines are distributed in Central America;however, Gansu moles are distributed in the Central and Southwest areas of China.The first specimen of Scapanulus oweni was found by G. Fenwick Owen in 1911 in Gansu, China. The genome of the species is 16,826 bases in length and contains 13 protein-coding genes, 22 transfer genes, 2 ribosomal RNA genes and a displacement loop gene. Li, Y., Li, J., & Zhang, Y. (2016). Fossil Scapanulus oweni (Eulipotyphla, Mammalia) from the Shanyangzhai Cave, Middle Pleistocene, Qinhuangdao, China. Quaternary International, 392, 197–202. doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2015.08.001 /ref> He, K., Wang, J., Su, W., Li, Q., Nie, W., & Jiang, X. (2012). Karyotype of the Gansu mole (Scapanulus oweni): Further evidence for karyotypic stability in talpid bstract Karyotype of the Gansu Mole (Scapanulus Oweni): Further Evidence for Karyotypic Stability in Talpid, 37(4), 341–348. doi:10.3106/041.037.0408/ref> Mammals described in 1912 Taxa named by Oldfield Thomas Mammals of China Talpidae Taxonomy articles created by Polbot {{soricomorpha-stub