''Lycopsis'' is an extinct

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial nom ...

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sout ...

metatheria Metatheria is a mammalian clade that includes all mammals more closely related to marsupials than to placentals. First proposed by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1880, it is a more inclusive group than the marsupials; it contains all marsupials as wel ...

n, that lived during the

Miocene The Miocene ( ) is the first epoch (geology), 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 mea ...

Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...

and Colombia.

History

Although not named until 1927,

Florentino Ameghino Florentino Ameghino (born Giovanni Battista Fiorino Giuseppe Ameghino September 19, 1853 – August 6, 1911) was an Argentine naturalist, paleontologist, anthropologist and zoologist, whose fossil discoveries on the Argentine Pampas, especially ...

described a species now seen as synonymous with ''Lycopsis torresi'', ''Anatherium oxyrhynchus'', in 1895 based on a mandibular ramus with several teeth.Marshall, L. G. (1977). A new species of Lycopsis (Borhyaenidae: Marsupialia) from the La Venta fauna (Late Miocene) of Colombia, South America. ''Journal of Paleontology'', 633-642. The fossil was recovered from Puesto Estancia La Costa in Santa Cruz, Argentina, dating to the

. The type material of ''Lycopsis'' was collected in July 1895 by "C. Berry" from the middle

strata of the

Santa Cruz Formation The Santa Cruz Formation is a geological formation in the Magallanes/Austral Basin in southern Patagonia in Argentina and in adjacent areas of Chile. It dates to the late Early Miocene epoch, and is contemporaneous with eponymous Santacrucian ...

along the Santa Cruz River in the same area.Cabrera, Á. (1927). Datos para el conocimiento de los dasiuroideos fósiles argentinos. ''Revista del Museo de la Plata'', ''30'', 271-315. The fossils (MLP 11-113) were fragmentary, constituting only several fragmentary jaw sections from the maxilla and mandible, including several molars.Argot, C. (2004). Functional-adaptive analysis of the postcranial skeleton of a Laventan borhyaenoid, Lycopsis longirostris (Marsupialia, Mammalia). ''Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology'', ''24''(3), 689-708. However, these fossils weren't named until in 1927, Angelo Cabrera named ''Lycopsis torresi'', the generic name meaning "wolf-like aspect" after the anatomy of the mandible and the specific name after Argentine paleontologist and the director of the Museo de la Plata at the time, Luis Maria Torres.

Taxonomy

The

cladogram A cladogram (from Greek ''clados'' "branch" and ''gramma'' "character") is a diagram used in cladistics to show relations among organisms. A cladogram is not, however, an evolutionary tree because it does not show how ancestors are related to ...

after the analysis of Suárez ''et al''., 2015, looks as follows:

Distribution

Fossils of ''Lycopsis'' have been found in:''Lycopsis''
at Fossilworks.org * Arroyo Chasicó Formation and Santa Cruz Formations,

* Honda Group, Colombia

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q3840985 Sparassodonts Burdigalian first appearances Tortonian extinctions Miocene mammals of South America Chasicoan Mayoan Laventan Colloncuran Friasian Santacrucian Neogene Argentina Fossils of Argentina Neogene Colombia Fossils of Colombia Honda Group, Colombia Fossil taxa described in 1927 Prehistoric mammal genera