Chriacus
Chriacus is an extinct genus of placental mammals that lived in what is now North America during the Paleocene and early Eocene epochs. In life, members of the genus may have looked and lived in ways similar to coatimundis, though they were not closely related to any living mammal. Like many early Cenozoic mammals, its relationships are uncertain, with possible affinities to ungulates or Ferae. Chriacus and similar Paleocene-Eocene mammals are generally known as arctocyonids, though it is unclear whether different arctocyonids are actually related to each other.

ДиБгд · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- ArctocyonidaePBDB
- Diet
- omnivorePBDB
- Life habit
- scansorialPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Eutheria
Time the record covers
At least 7.4 million years on record.
The record covers at least 63.4 Mya to 56 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 66 Mya to 48.07 Mya.
166 occurrences of Chriacus on record, most of them in the Paleocene. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
166 occurrencesThese are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
21 formations
- Willwood Formation40
- Nacimiento Formation32
- Fort Union Formation26
- "Fort Union" (= Lebo) Formation10
- Wasatch Formation8
- North Horn Formation7
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The named rock units Chriacus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 14 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Chriacus and its relatives
PaleoceneWhere Chriacus and its relatives were recorded in the Paleocene.
Found in the same rock
835 taxa- Tricentes subtrigonus31 sites
- Coryphodon28 sites
- Phenacodus vortmani27 sites
- Tetraclaenodon puercensis26 sites
- Anisonchus sectorius25 sites
- Promioclaenus acolytus23 sites
- Hyopsodus loomisi20 sites
- Periptychus carinidens20 sites
- Viverravus acutus19 sites
- Cantius abditus18 sites
- Diacodexis metsiacus18 sites
- Hyopsodus17 sites
- Psittacotherium multifragum17 sites
- Bessoecetor septentrionalis16 sites
- Crocodylia16 sites
- Ectocion osbornianus16 sites
- Esthonyx bisulcatus16 sites
- Arctocyon ferox15 sites
- Didymictis15 sites
- Phenacodus intermedius15 sites
- Protictis haydenianus15 sites
- Phenacodus14 sites
- Phenacolemurinae14 sites
- Protoselene opisthacus14 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 132 sites for Chriacus, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
44 references- Synonymies and reidentifications of North American fossil mammals27
- Paleocene vertebrate paleontology of the San Juan Basin, New Mexico19
- Stratigraphy and mammalian paleontology of the McCullough Peaks, northern Bighorn Basin, Wyoming: Implications for biochronology, basin development, and community reorganization across the Paleocene-Eocene boundary14
- Earliest Eocene mammalian fauna from the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum at Sand Creek Divide, southern Bighorn Basin, Wyoming13
- The Kutz Canyon Local Fauna, Torrejonian (Middle Paleocene) of the San Juan Basin, New Mexico;9
- Distribution and stratigraphic correlation of upper Paleocene and lower Eocene fossil mammal and plant localities of the Fort Union, Willwood, and Tatman formations, southern Bighorn Basin, Wyoming6
- Fossil Mammalia from the early Wasatchian Four Mile fauna, Eocene of northwest Colorado6
- The Tiffanian Land-Mammal Age (middle and late Paleocene) in the northern Bighorn Basin, Wyoming5
- New earliest Wasatchian mammalian fauna from the Eocene of northwestern Wyoming: composition and diversity in a rarely sampled high-floodplain assemblage4
- Paleontology and biostratigraphy of lower part of Polecat Bench Formation, southern Bighorn Basin, Wyoming4
- Faunal Zonation of the Willwood Formation in the Central Bighorn Basin, Wyoming4
- The beginning of the Age of Mammals4
Each of the 166 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. 32 further references are not listed. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content2
Picture of Chriacus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- ДиБгд
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
CT scan
- Source
- MorphoSource
- Licence
- In Copyright
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
- Specimen
- Chriacus Chriacus punitor · uwbm:vp:98258
The description on this site
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Chriacus”
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itArctocyonidae through timeFormations of the PaleoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Cope 1883