Pachycetus

Pachycetus (meaning "thick whale") is a genus of basilosaurine basilosaurid from Middle Eocene (Bartonian) of the eastern United States, and Ukraine.

Pachycetus
Temporal range: Bartonian[1]
Life restoration
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Artiodactyla
Infraorder: Cetacea
Family: †Basilosauridae
Genus: †Pachycetus
van Beneden, 1883
Species
  • P. paulsoni (Brandt, 1873) (type)
  • P. wardii? (Uhen, 1999)
Synonyms[2]
  • Basilotritus Goldin and Zvonok 2013
  • Platyosphys Kellogg 1936

Taxonomy

Zeuglodon paulsoni was described in 1873 on the basis of several vertebrae from a Bartonian-age horizon in southern Ukraine.[3] In his 1936 monograph regarding Archaeoceti, Remington Kellogg recognized the distinct nature of the taxon and coined the new genus Platyosphys for Z. paulsoni.[4] Another new species of Platyosphys, P. einori, was coined for vertebrae, a scapula, and rib fragments in 2001.[5]

In the original description of Basilotritus, Platyosphys and its constituent species were considered nomina dubia because their material was considered insufficiently diagnostic to generic or specific level.[6] However, a 2015 paper describing archaeocetes from the Western Sahara described a new species, P. aithai, and reiterated the diagnostic nature of the type species of Platyosphys, suggesting that Basilotritus might be a synonym of Platyosphys.[7]

In a paper published in 2020, van Vliet noted that the vertebrae of Platyosphys and Basilotritus were identical to vertebrae from the Late Eocene of Germany that were named Pachycetus by Pierre Joseph van Beneden in 1883, synonymizing the former two genera with Pachycetus.[8] Platosphys aithai was renamed Antaecetus by Gingerich et al. (2022), who also made Pachycetus robustus a junior synonym of paulsonii along with Platyosphys einori to create the new combination Pachycetus paulsonii, making paulsonii the epithet of the Pachycetus type species.[9]

References
  1. "PBDB". paleobiodb.org. Retrieved 5 September 2021.
  2. "Pachycetus". Fossilworks. Retrieved 28 November 2022 from the Paleobiology Database.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  3. J. F. Brandt. 1873. Uber bisher in Russland gefundene Reste von Zeuglodonten. Melanges biologiques Bulletin de l'Academie imperials des Sciences de St. Petersbourg 9:111-112
  4. R. Kellogg. 1936. A Review of the Archaeoceti. Carnegie Institution of Washington 482:1-366
  5. V. Gritsenko. 2001. New species Platiosphys [Platyosphys] einori (Archaeoceti) from Oligocenic deposits of Kyiv. Visnyk Heolohila Kyivskyi Natsionalyi Universytet Imeni Tarasa Shevchenka 20:17-20
  6. Pavel Gol'din and Evgenij Zvonok (2013). "Basilotritus uheni, a New Cetacean (Cetacea, Basilosauridae) from the Late Middle Eocene of Eastern Europe". Journal of Paleontology 87 (2): 254–268. doi:10.1666/12-080R.1.
  7. Philip D. Gingerich and Samir Zouhri (2015). "New fauna of archaeocete whales (Mammalia, Cetacea) from the Bartonian middle Eocene of southern Morocco". Journal of African Earth Sciences 111: 273–286. doi:10.1016/j.jafrearsci.2015.08.006.
  8. H. van Vliet, M. Bosselaers, B.-W. Vahldiek, T. Paymans, and I. Verheijen. 2020. Eocene cetaceans from the Helmstedt region, Germany, with some remarks on Platyosphys, Basilotritus and Pachycetus. Cainozoic Research 20(1):121-148.
  9. Gingerich PD, Amane A, Zouhri S (2022) Skull and partial skeleton of a new pachycetine genus (Cetacea, Basilosauridae) from the Aridal Formation, Bartonian middle Eocene, of southwestern Morocco. PLoS ONE 17(10): e0276110. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0276110


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