• New fossils of Late Pleistocene Sus scrofa from Yangjiawan Cave 2, Jiangxi, China

    分类: 生物学 >> 动物学 提交时间: 2020-09-15 合作期刊: 《古脊椎动物学报》

    摘要: The YJW (Yangjiawan) Cave 2 of Pingxiang in Jiangxi Province is a karst cave that developed in the Permian limestone of the Changxing Formation, which is filled with clay and grit of Late Pleistocene age. Six excavations have been conducted at the site since 2015. More than ten thousand mammalian fossils have been unearthed, and the wild boar fossils account for approximately 49%, which represents the richest wild boar fossil tooth collection of Pleistocene age in southern China. This study focuses on the studies of the canine teeth and the third molars, and mainly compares fossils of Sus peii and S. xiaozhu in South China and the data of extant S. scrofa respectively in dental morphology and odontometric data analyses which includes scatter plot analysis, regression analysis, coefficient of variation analysis and linear discriminant analysis. The typical scrofic type of the male’s lower canine teeth confirmed the identification of the suid fossils from YJW Cave 2 as S. scrofa. Although the male’s lower canines, the M2s and m3s, are among the most variable teeth in sizes, they stay in the ranges of S. scrofa; furthermore, the scatterplots of both the upper and lower third molars form two distinct clusters respectively, which can probably be attributed to sexual dimorphism rather than resulting from a mixture of different suid species. The post-Early Pleistocene suid fauna in southern China is almost only composed of S. scrofa, which is quite different from the adjacent Southeast Asia where the suid fauna is quite taxonomically diversified and dominated by the verrucosic type.