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Mammalian Dispersal at the Paleocene/Eocene Boundary
Gabriel J. Bowen,1*William C. Clyde,2Paul L. Koch,1Suyin Ting,34John Alroy,5Takehisa Tsubamoto,6Yuanqing Wang,4Yuan Wang4
A profound faunal reorganization occurred near the Paleocene/Eocene
boundary, when several groups of mammals abruptly appearedon the
Holarctic continents. To test the hypothesis that thisevent featured
the dispersal of groups from Asia to North Americaand Europe, we used
isotope stratigraphy, magnetostratigraphy,and quantitative
biochronology to constrain the relative age ofimportant Asian faunas.
The extinct family Hyaenodontidae appearedin Asia before it did so in
North America, and the modern ordersPrimates, Artiodactyla, and
Perissodactyla first appeared in Asiaat or before the Paleocene/Eocene
boundary. These results areconsistent with Asia being a center for
early mammalian origination.
1 Department of Earth Sciences, University of
California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA.
2 Department
of Earth Sciences, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824-3589,
USA.
3 Museum of Natural Science, Louisiana State
University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA.
4 Institute
of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of
Sciences, Post Office Box 643, Beijing 100044, People's Republic of
China.
5 National Center for Ecological Analysis and
Synthesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93101-3351,
USA.
6 Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University,
Inuyama 484-8506, Japan.
*
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
gbowen{at}es.ucsc.edu
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