Taparito (Miocene of Venezuela)

Where: Falcon, Venezuela (11.2° N, 70.2° W: paleocoordinates 11.0° N, 68.8° W)

• coordinate stated in text

• small collection-level geographic resolution

When: Upper Member (Urumaco Formation), Late/Upper Miocene (11.6 - 5.3 Ma)

• As mentioned in Patterson’s field notes of 1972, the fossils described here were collected from the upper member of the Urumaco Formation which is usually considered as late Miocene in age (Linares 2004).

• member-level stratigraphic resolution

Environment/lithology: coastal; fine-grained, medium sandstone

• Several geological studies indicate that deposition of the formation occurred along a complex of mar- ginal and near-coastal environments (Dıaz de Gamero &Linares 1989;Hambalek et al. 1994; Quiroz & Jaramillo 2010).
• The Urumaco Formation is part of a lithostratigraphical unit, around 2000 m thick, composed of a complex intercalation of medium- to fine-grained sandstones, organic-rich mudstone, coal, shale and thick-bedded coquinoidal limestone with abundant mollusc fragments (Linares 2004).

Size class: macrofossils

Collected by Dr Bryan Patterson and A. D. Lewis, R. C. Wood, D. C. Fisher, R. W. Repenning and M. F. Stanford in 1972

• The specimens collected by the Harvard University team, originally housed in the MCZ collection, were recently transferred to the Museo de Ciencias de Caracas (MCNC), Caracas, Venezuela.

Primary reference: A. D. Rincón, A. Solórzano, H. G. McDonald and M. Montellano-Ballesteros. 2019. Two new megalonychid sloths (Mammalia: Xenarthra) from the Urumaco Formation (late Miocene), and their phylogenetic affinities. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 17(5):409-421 [P. Mannion/M. Kouvari/P. Mannion]more details

Purpose of describing collection: taxonomic analysis

PaleoDB collection 198252: authorized by Philip Mannion, entered by Miranta Kouvari on 12.12.2018

Creative Commons license: CC BY (attribution)

Taxonomic list

Mammalia
 Megatherioidea - Megalonychidae
Urumacocnus urbanii n. gen. n. sp.
Urumacocnus urbanii n. gen. n. sp. Rincón et al. 2019 edentate
Holotype: MCNC-10-72V, Referred material: MCNC 60-72V (left and right femur)