Platygonus
Sign in to savePlatygonus ("flat head" in reference to the straight shape of the forehead) is an extinct genus of herbivorous peccaries of the family Tayassuidae, endemic to North and South America from the Miocene through Pleistocene epochs (10.3 million to 11,000 years ago), existing for about . P. compressus stood tall.
~6 min read
Encyclopedic overview
9 sectionsContents
- Taxonomy
- Description
- Ecology
- Distribution
- Taxonomy
- Fossil localities
- References
- Bibliography
- Further reading
Platygonus ("flat head" in reference to the straight shape of the forehead) is an extinct genus of herbivorous peccaries of the family Tayassuidae, endemic to North and South America from the Miocene through Pleistocene epochs (10.3 million to 11,000 years ago), existing for about . P. compressus stood tall.
== Taxonomy == While long thought to be the sister-lineage to the Chacoan peccary based on morphological similarities, a 2017 ancient DNA study which recovered mitochondrial DNA from Platygonus found that all living peccaries are more closely related to each other than they are to Platygonus. The estimated divergence between Platygonus and all living peccaries was placed in the Miocene, around 22 million years ago.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Platygonus” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.