Galadi speciosus, Travouillon, Gurovich, Beck & Muirhead, 2010

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 : 325-326

† Galadi

SPECIES SCORED: † Galadi speciosus (type species).

GEOLOGICAL PROVENANCE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Boid, Camel Sputum, Judith’s Horizontalis, Microsite, Mike’s Menagerie, Neville’s Garden, Quantum Leap, Upper, and Wayne’s Wok sites (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); radiometric dates from Woodhead et al. (2014) are 16.97– 18.53 Mya for Camel Sputum Site and 17.72–18.53 Mya for Neville’s Garden Site, but the other sites lack dates, so we have conservatively assumed the entire span of the early Miocene (Aquitanian to Burdigalian; Cohen et al., 2013 [updated]) for this taxon.

ASSIGNED AGE RANGE: 23.030 –15.970 Mya.

REMARKS: † Galadi speciosus was described by Travouillon et al. (2010) based on well-preserved craniodental specimens (notably the holotype, QM F23393, an almost perfect cranium and associated partial dentaries) from Riversleigh Faunal zones A and B. Later, a three further species († G. adversus, † G. amplus, and † G. grandis ) were described from Riversleigh Faunal zones B and C (Travouillon et al., 2013b), but we did not use these to score character data for this study. Like † Bulungu , † Galadi appears to be craniodentally more plesiomorphic than Recent peramelemorphians, and it has been recovered outside the peramelemorphian crown clade in published phylogenetic analyses (Travouillon et al., 2010, 2013a, 2013b, 2014a, 2105b, 2017, 2019; Gurovich et al., 2014; Chamberlain et al., 2015; Kear et al., 2016; Travouillon and Phillips, 2018). The proportionally brevirostral skull of † G. speciosus also suggests that it may have fed on larger prey items than do modern peramelemorphians (Travouillon et al., 2010).