Notomys
A hopping mouse is any of about ten different Australian native mice in the genus Notomys. They are rodents, not marsupials, and their ancestors are thought to have arrived from Asia about 5 million years ago.

Boyd Essex · 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- Also called
- hopping mousePBDB
- Sits inside
- MurinaePBDB
- Diet
- herbivore, insectivorePBDB, for Muridae
- Life habit
- saltatorialPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Eutheria
Time the record covers
At most 2.6 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 2.58 Mya and 0 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
15 occurrences of Notomys on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. 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
15 occurrences- Pleistocene79%
- Holocene21%
These 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.
Notomys and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Notomys and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
179 taxa- Pseudomys12 sites
- Bettongia lesueur10 sites
- Dasyurus viverrinus10 sites
- Cercartetus nanus9 sites
- Isoodon obesulus9 sites
- Mastacomys9 sites
- Perameles gunnii9 sites
- Petaurus breviceps9 sites
- Pseudocheirus peregrinus9 sites
- Rattus9 sites
- Sminthopsis crassicaudata9 sites
- Antechinus flavipes8 sites
- Potorous platyops8 sites
- Cercartetus lepidus7 sites
- Conilurus7 sites
- Phascogale tapoatafa7 sites
- Sminthopsis murina7 sites
- Trichosurus vulpecula7 sites
- Bettongia6 sites
- Macropus6 sites
- Macropus rufogriseus6 sites
- Perameles bougainville6 sites
- Sminthopsis6 sites
- Thylacoleo carnifex6 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 14 sites for Notomys, 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
9 references- Late Quaternary Small Mammal Faunas of the Naracoorte Caves World Heritage Area3
- Pleistocene fossil vertebrate sites of the South East region of South Australia II3
- Pleistocene fossil vertebrate sites of the South East region of South Australia2
- Mandu Mandu Creek Rockshelter: Pleistocene Human Coastal Occupation of North West Cape, Western Australia2
- Conservation implications of a new fossil species of hopping-mouse, Notomys magnus sp. nov. (Rodentia: Muridae), from the Broken River Region, northeastern Queensland1
- Palaeontological excavation and taphonomic investigation of the late Pleistocene fossil deposit in Grant Hall, Victoria Fossil Cave, Naracoorte, South Australia1
- Systematics and evolution of the sthenurine kangaroos1
- Phascolarctos (Marsupialia, Vombatoidea) and an associated fossil fauna from Koala Cave near Yanchep, Western Australia1
- Vertebrate remains from the Nullarbor caves, Western Australia1
Each of the 15 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. 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 Notomys
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Boyd Essex
- 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
- Notomys mitchellii · SAMA:Mammalogy:M24955
Smithsonian Open Access was not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- 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 itMurinae through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Lesson 1842