The reporter recently learned from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology that they cooperated with Harvard University and other institutions to identify the 6.2 million-year-old long-fold Sumatran rabbit fossil found in the Zhaotong Shuitang Dam in Yunnan Province.
Researcher Deng Tao, director of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that the striped rabbits that appear in Sumatra and Southeast Asia, also known as Sumatran rabbits, are distributed in the Balisan Mountains west of Sumatra Island, and because the tropical rainforests they inhabit are largely deforested and their habitats are seriously damaged, they are listed as critically endangered species. The question of the origin of the striped rabbit remained unresolved for a long time until 1986, when Qiu Zhuding and Han Defen discovered the Late Miocene long-fold winged rabbit in Lufeng, which is considered the ancestral type of Sumatran rabbit.
In order to further study the mammal population of the late Cenozoic in Yunnan, the Institute of Paleovertebrates of the Chinese Academy of Sciences cooperated with the Yunnan Institute of Archaeology and the Zhaotong Municipal Government, with the participation of many universities and museums in the United States, to carry out stratigraphic surveys and fossil excavations in the Zhaotong area. In March 2015, a field excavation led by Deng Tao's ancient spine collected a precious rabbit-shaped mandibular fossil in the 6.2 million-year-old black carbonite mudstone of Zhaotong Shuitang Dam.
The morphology of this fossil premolars suggests that the Late Miocene rabbit is an early representative of the striped rabbit living in the humid area today, that is, the Sumatran rabbit, and the long-folded winged rabbit found earlier in Lufeng, Yunnan, is exactly the same as the fossil form found in Zhaotong and should belong to the same species, so it is revised and renamed the long-fold Sumatran rabbit, and their habitat in Lufeng and Zhaotong is a wet swampy area.
Deng Tao introduced that combined with some other incomplete specimens found in Zhaotong Shuitang Dam, as well as materials previously found in Lufeng Lime Dam, the discovery and identification played an important role in elucidating the origin of the mysterious rabbit-shaped class sumatran rabbit, and thus reconstructed the evolutionary history of sumatran rabbit, that is, after the genus appeared 8 million years ago, it quickly spread to all of Southeast Asia, and eventually reached the present-day Sumatra region. (Reporter Zhao Hanbin)
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