Establishing a neotype for Crocidura obtusa Kretzoi, 1938 (Mammalia, Soricidae): an emended description of this Pleistocene white‑toothed shrew species

Mészáros, Lukács and Botka, Dániel and Gasparik, Mihály (2020) Establishing a neotype for Crocidura obtusa Kretzoi, 1938 (Mammalia, Soricidae): an emended description of this Pleistocene white‑toothed shrew species. Paläontologische Zeitschrift, 94 (2). pp. 367-375. ISSN 0031-0220 (print); 1867-6812 (online)

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Abstract

We establish a neotype in the collection of the Hungarian Natural History Museum, Budapest (Hungary) for Crocidura obtusa (Mammalia, Soricidae). The species was originally described by M. Kretzoi as a new species from the Early Pleistocene locality of Gombaszög (now Gombasek, Slovakia) in 1938, but the holotype was lost in 1956. The neotype is a complete left mandible from the Osztramos 8 site (Hungary, Early Pleistocene). Due to the incomplete original description given by Kretzoi, a new definition of this species also had to be composed. Kretzoi’s distinctive characteristics between C. obtusa and the recent Crocidura species are accepted here, but further differences were discovered in comparison with the contemporary C. kornfeldi. According to our taxonomic results, C. obtusa was present in Central Europe, mainly in the Carpathian Basin, from the Early Pleistocene (ca. 1.2 Ma) to the earliest Late Pleistocene (ca. 130–115 ka).

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