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Let’s look at Megistotherium again

Tuesday, September 22, 2026 8:49

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Sometimes all you get is teeth.
This time we have a skull without teeth for data (Fig 1). Megistotherium (Savage 1973) is said to be a Miocene apex predator and a very large hyaenodont. “Due to the paucity of material assigned to Megistotherium, size estimates for the genus have varied considerably over the years.” according to the Wikipedia summary.

According to the scale bar, this Megistotherium skull is 2/3 of a meter long.

Figure 1. Megistotherium on white. Palaeosinopa on yellow to scale and enlarged to size. Note the shape of the premaxilla just peeking out of the lower half of the maxilla along with the elevated sagittal crest.

Recent revisions
to the large reptile tree (LRT, 2340 taxa) now place the skull of Megistotherium with the much, much smaller and much older skull of Palaeosinopa, a semi-aquatic marsupial = water opossum from the Late Paleocene Green River Formation (Matthew 1901, Gingerich 1980; Rose and von Koenigswald 2005). Both taxa nest closer to the extant marsupials Didelphis and Monodelphis than to Hyaenodon (Fig 2) in the LRT.

Perhaps this is a case of convergence.

Figure 2. Hyaenodon does not nest with Oxyaena in the LRT, but with Callistoe and Sinonyx.

In any case,
this hypothesis needs to be tested with a similar taxon list.

Previous attempts at linking Megistotherium with other taxa in the LRT are here updated.

References
Gingerich PD 1980. A New Species of Palaeosinopa (Insectivora: Pantolestidae) from the Late Paleocene of Western North America. Journal of Mammalogy 61 (3): 449.
Matthew WD 1901. Additional observations on the Creodonta: Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, v. 14, p. 1–38.
Rose KD and von Koenigswald W 2005. An exceptionally complete skeleton of Palaeosinopa (Mammalia, Cimolesta, Pantolestidae) from the Green River formation, and other postcranial elements of the Pantolestidae from the Eocene of Wyoming (USA).
Palaeontographica, Abteilung A: Palaozoologie – Stratigraphie 55–96 E. Schweizerbart’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung 10.1127/pala/273/2005/55
Savage RJ 1973. Megistotherium,a gigantic hyaenodont from Miocene of Gebel Zelten, Libya. Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) Geology 22(7):483–511.

wiki/Palaeosinopa
wiki/Megistotherium

Source: https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2026/09/22/lets-look-at-megistotherium-again/

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