''Pappotherium'' is an extinct genus of mammals from the

Albian The Albian is both an age of the geologic timescale and a stage in the stratigraphic column. It is the youngest or uppermost subdivision of the Early/Lower Cretaceous Epoch/ Series. Its approximate time range is 113.0 ± 1.0 Ma to 100.5 ± 0 ...

( early Cretaceous) of Texas, US, known from a fossilized

maxilla The maxilla (plural: ''maxillae'' ) in vertebrates is the upper fixed (not fixed in Neopterygii) bone of the jaw formed from the fusion of two maxillary bones. In humans, the upper jaw includes the hard palate in the front of the mouth. T ...

fragment bearing two

tribosphenic molar The molars or molar teeth are large, flat teeth at the back of the mouth. They are more developed in mammals. They are used primarily to grind food during chewing. The name ''molar'' derives from Latin, ''molaris dens'', meaning "millstone to ...

s, discovered within the

Glen Rose Formation The Glen Rose Formation is a shallow marine to shoreline geological formation from the lower Cretaceous period exposed over a large area from South Central to North Central Texas. The formation is most widely known for the dinosaur footprints ...

near Decatur,

Wise County, Texas Wise County is a county in the U.S. state of Texas. As of the 2020 census, its population was 68,632. Its county seat is Decatur. Wise County is part of the Dallas–Fort Worth– Arlington metropolitan statistical area. Its Wise Eyes crime- ...

. The fossil was discovered by Bob H. Slaughter within some deposits dating back to 112.6 – 109 million years ago. On the basis of the morphology of the molars'

cusp A cusp is the most pointed end of a curve. It often refers to cusp (anatomy), a pointed structure on a tooth. Cusp or CUSP may also refer to: Mathematics * Cusp (singularity), a singular point of a curve * Cusp catastrophe, a branch of bifurc ...

s, in 1965 Slaughter established the new genus ''Pappotherium'' and the new species ''P. pattersoni''; he also created an apposite family, Pappotheriidae. Both this family and the genus are nowadays still

monotypic In biology, a monotypic taxon is a taxonomic group (taxon) that contains only one immediately subordinate taxon. A monotypic species is one that does not include subspecies or smaller, infraspecific taxa. In the case of genera, the term "unispe ...

. Slaughter argued that ''Pappotherium'' should have been a basal form close to the

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 ...

eutheria Eutheria (; from Greek , 'good, right' and , 'beast'; ) is the clade consisting of all therian mammals that are more closely related to placentals than to marsupials. Eutherians are distinguished from noneutherians by various phenotypic tra ...

n divergence point; this mammal likely was an

arboreal Arboreal locomotion is the locomotion of animals in trees. In habitats in which trees are present, animals have evolved to move in them. Some animals may scale trees only occasionally, but others are exclusively arboreal. The habitats pose nu ...

insectivore. Etymologically speaking, the name ''Pappotherium'' is a compound of the Latin words ''pappus'' (from

ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...

πάππος, ''páppos'', “grandfather”) and ''therium'' (from ancient Greek θηρίον, ''thēríon'', “beast”, a common suffix among extinct mammals), with the full meaning of “mammal-grandfather”. The second part of the unique species' name, ''pattersoni'', was instead chosen in honor of the American paleontologist Bryan Patterson. More recently, it has been recovered as a possible

deltatheroidean Deltatheroida is an extinct group of basal metatherians that were distantly related to modern marsupials. The majority of known members of the group lived in the Cretaceous; one species, '' Gurbanodelta kara'', is known from the late Paleocene ( ...

.S. Bi, X. Jin, S. Li and T. Du. 2015. A new Cretaceous metatherian mammal from Henan, China. PeerJ 3:e896 The most recent phylogeny including ''Pappotherium'' is reproduced below.

References

Bibliography

*Slaughter, B. H. 1965, "A therian from the lower Cretaceous (Albian) of Texas", ''Postilla'' 93, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, pp. 1–18. *Davis, B. M. & Cifelli, R. L. 2011, "Reappraisal of the tribosphenidan mammals from the Trinity Group (Aptian–Albian) of Texas and Oklahoma", ''Acta Palaeontologica Polonica'' 56 (3), pp. 441–62. {{Taxonbar, from=Q18158210 Cretaceous mammals Cretaceous mammals of North America Prehistoric monotypic mammal genera Fossil taxa described in 1965 Wise County, Texas Prehistoric metatherians Prehistoric mammal genera