Taxonomic comments of a *Glossotherium* specimen from the Pleistocene of Central Chile
Abstract
The Mylodontidae family was once one of the most diverse Pleistocene fauna in South America. Within this family, the genus Glossotherium showed a wide distribution in the southern cone with a single record in Chile SGO.PV.2 housed at the National Museum of Natural History of Chile. Provided that the species allocation of this individual as Glossotherium lettsomi was made 48 years ago, a revision was carried out considering new taxonomic studies. Based on this recent information, a new diagnosis of the specimen was carried out. Principal component analyses (PCA) and a linear discriminant analyses (LDA) were performed using comparative cranial data obtained from the literature in order to establish initial morphological affinities. In addition, a phylogenetic inference analysis was conducted to establish the phylogenetic position of SGO.PV.2. Finally, the first description of the post-cranial skeleton of SGO.PV.2 is also provided. The results of the different analyzes performed in this study indicate that SGO.PV.2 should be assigned to the species Glossotherium robustum, thus currently representing the only record of this species in Chile.
Thomas A. Püschel
Postdoctoral researcher
I am an evolutionary anthropologist and vertebrate palaeobiologist mainly focused on human, primate and mammalian evolution. My main interest is to study organismal evolution by reconstructing and comparing the palaeobiology of fossils to their living ecological relatives. In order to do this, I apply a combination of phylogenetics, 3D morphometrics, virtual biomechanical techniques, computational simulations, statistical modelling, phylogenetic comparative methods, and fieldwork. I am part of the Venditti group, University of Reading, within the framework of the Leverhulme project ‘The evolutionary and biogeographical routes to hominin diversity’. I am also a research affiliate at the Institute of Human Sciences, University of Oxford, where I work together with the Paleo-Primate Project Gorongosa, Mozambique.