Prosiphneus
Prosiphneus is an extinct genus of rodent that lived during Miocene to Quaternary of China and Russia.

Jonathan Chen · CC BY-SA 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
- SiphneidaePBDB
- Diet
- herbivorePBDB, for Rodentia
- Life habit
- ground dwellingPBDB, for Rodentia
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Eutheria
Time the record covers
At least 9 million years on record.
The record covers at least 11.63 Mya to 2.58 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 15.98 Mya to 11.7 ka.
23 occurrences of Prosiphneus on record, most of them in the Pliocene. 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
23 occurrences- Miocene25%
- Pliocene51%
- Pleistocene24%
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.
Found in
3 formations
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The named rock units Prosiphneus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 20 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Prosiphneus and its relatives
PlioceneWhere Prosiphneus and its relatives were recorded in the Pliocene.
Found in the same rock
150 taxa- Ochotona15 sites
- Mimomys14 sites
- Orientalomys10 sites
- Cricetidae9 sites
- Nannocricetus8 sites
- Muridae7 sites
- Sminthoides7 sites
- Germanomys6 sites
- Hypolagus6 sites
- Apodemus5 sites
- Sorex5 sites
- Talpidae5 sites
- Ochotonoides4 sites
- Pliopentalagus4 sites
- Soricidae4 sites
- Gazella3 sites
- Hipparion3 sites
- Sicista3 sites
- Villanyia3 sites
- Adcrocuta eximia2 sites
- Antilospira2 sites
- Beremendia2 sites
- Castor anderssoni2 sites
- Cervidae2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 22 sites for Prosiphneus, 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- A preliminary report on the Late Pliocene Micromammalian fauna from Yangyuan and Yuxian, Hebei9
- Neogene micromammals of China3
- Some Pliocene mammalian fossils from Songshan 2 and 3 (Tianzhu, Gansu) and the Songshan Fauna3
- The Chinese Neogene mammalian biochronology - its correlation with the European Neogene mammal zonation2
- The Late Cenozoic Faunistic complexes of Transbaikalia with special reference to the micromammalia2
- Out of Tibet: Pliocene woolly rhino suggests high-plateau origin of Ice Age megaherbivores1
- Land mammal faunal sequence of the late Miocene of China: new evidence from Lantian, Shaanxi Province1
- The early Pliocene Micromammalian Fauna of Bilike, Inner Mongolia, China (Mammalia: Lipotyphla, Chiroptera, Rodentia, Lagomorpha)1
- Villafranchian fauna of small mammals of the Western Transbaikal1
Each of the 23 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 content1
Picture of Prosiphneus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Jonathan Chen
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Prosiphneus was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Prosiphneus”
- 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 itSiphneidae through timeFormations of the PlioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Teilhard de Jardin 1926