Bohra illuminata, Prideaux & Warburton, 2008

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 : 335-336

† Bohra

SPECIES SCORED: † Bohra illuminata .

GEOLOGICAL PROVENANCE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Last Tree Cave, Nullarbor Plain, southeastern Western Australia.

AGE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Prideaux et al. (2007) identified fossils from the Last Tree Cave as early middle Pleistocene; we have interpreted this as corresponding to the first half of the Chibanian stage (Cohen et al., 2013 [updated]).

ASSIGNED AGE RANGE: 0.774 –0.452 Mya.

REMARKS: † Bohra paulae was originally described and identified as a plesiomorphic tree kangaroo by Flannery and Szalay (1982) based on postcranial elements from Plio-Pleistocene deposits from Wellington Caves in New South Wales. A second species, † B. wilkinsonorum, was named by Dawson (2004) based on a single partial juvenile maxilla from the late Pliocene Chinchilla Local Fauna in southeastern Queensland. Prideaux and Warburton (2008) described a third species, † B. illuminata , based on exceptionally well-preserved craniodental material from early middle Pleistocene cave deposits in the Nullarbor Plain. A fourth species, † B. nullarbora , has also been described, again based on specimens from early middle Pleistocene cave deposits in the Nullarbor Plain (Prideaux and Warburton, 2009). Prideaux and Warburton (2008) noted that some aspects of the craniodental morphology of † B. illuminata are more similar to extant Petrogale species (particularly P. brachyotis ), than to extant Dendrolagus species. In their subsequent phylogenetic analysis, Prideaux and Warburton (2010) recovered † B. illuminata as the sister taxon to Dendrolagus , with P. brachyotis (the sole Petrogale species included in their matrix) as sister to this clade, and referred to the † Bohra - Dendrolagus - Petrogale clade as Dendrolagini (see also Jackson and Groves, 2015). By contrast, Flannery (1989) and Kear and Cooke (2001) restricted Dendrolagini to † Bohra and Dendrolagus only. Recent molecular and total-evidence phylogenies consistently support a sister-group relationship between Petrogale (sensu Groves, 2005, i.e., including Peradorcas ) and Dendrolagus (see, e.g., Meredith et al., 2009a, 2009b; Phillips et al., 2013; Llamas et al., 2015; Mitchell et al., 2014; Dodt et al., 2017; Cascini et al., 2019; Celik et al., 2019; Álvarez-Carretero et al., 2021).