Ganawamaya gillespieae

Beck, Robin M. D., Voss, Robert S. & Jansa, Sharon A., 2022, Craniodental Morphology And Phylogeny Of Marsupials, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2022 (457), pp. 1-353 : 338

† Ganawamaya

SPECIES SCORED: † Ganawamaya gillespieae .

GEOLOGICAL PROVENANCE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Quantum Leap Site (Riversleigh Faunal Zone B), Riversleigh World Heritage Area, Queensland, Australia.

AGE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Riversleigh Faunal Zone B is interpreted to be early Miocene based on biostratigraphy (see above). In the absence of radiometric dates, we have assumed the entire span of the early Miocene (Aquitanian to Burdigalian; Cohen et al., 2013 [updated]) for this terminal.

ASSIGNED AGE RANGE: 23.030 –15.970 Mya.

REMARKS: We scored † Ganawamaya gillespieae , the second balbarid included in our taxon sample, based on the holotype (QM F35432), an almost complete cranium and associated mandibles from the Quantum Leap Site of Riversleigh Faunal Zone B (Kear et al., 2007). One of the two paratypes of † G. gillespieae (AR 15347) is known from the older (Riversleigh Faunal Zone A) White Hunter Site, but neither this nor the other paratype (AR 12829) from the Riversleigh Faunal Zone B Wayne’s Wok Site was consulted for scoring purposes here. Kear et al. (2007) originally described this taxon as a species of † Nambaroo, but we follow Butler et al. (2018), who assigned it to † Ganawamaya . Our current understanding of the evolutionary relationships of balbarids is summarized above (see † Balbaroo ).