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Paleontological Research
Abstract
Abstract.
A new cyprinid fish, Nipponocypris takayamai sp. nov. is described from the Middle Pleistocene Nogami Formation in Oita Prefecture, Northern Kyushu, Japan. Nipponocypris takayamai differs from its congeners in the following combination of characters: the sensory canal of the parietal not reach to the medial edge of the parietal, and its length longer than half the width of the parietal; the notch of the orbital margin of the frontal weak; the dorsal margin of opercle concave; the posterodorsal margin of the fourth infraorbital L-shaped; the sensory canal of the dentary running slightly ventrally; 42–44 vertebrae; the flanges of the neural spines of the second and third preuralcentra elongated to the dorsal ends of the neural spines; eight supraneurals between the dorsal fin and the supraneural 3 bone; the dorsal fin base located slightly more posterior than the pelvic fin base; first three dorsal fin rays unbranched and unsegmented; eight dorsal fin rays, ten dorsal fin pterygiophores; and eleven anal fin pterygiophores with thirteen anal fin rays. A cladistic analysis suggests that this new species is related to N. sieboldii, N. koreanus and N. temminckii, and is probably the sister taxon to N. temminckii. This new species shows that an extinct species closely related to Recent Nipponocypris existed until the Middle Pleistocene in East Asia.
The authors are greatly indebted to Teruya Uyeno of the National Museum of Nature and Science for his encouragement and suggestions throughout this study. The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to Akinori Takayama of the Hakusan Kogyo Corporation for the donation of the holotype and paratypes to the Kitakyushu Museum of Natural History and Human History and his help in collecting other specimens and fieldwork. Naoki Eto of Kokonoe town is thanked for donating the paratypes to the National Museum of Nature and Science. The authors are grateful to Hideo Takagi, Yoshihide Ogasawara, Ren Hirayama and Tohru Ohta of Waseda University for their valuable suggestions and comments to the first author. The authors also deeply thank Akinori Takahashi of Waseda University for his comments on an early version of this manuscript. The authors also wish to thank the following people for the loan of specimens and their help in the fieldwork: Makoto Manabe (National Museum of Nature and Science) for helping in examining NSM specimens; and Tokuji Mitsugi (The Factory of Education and Welfare Science of Oita University) and the staff of Hakusan Kogyo Corporation for their help and support to the fieldwork in Oita Prefecture. The authors also deeply thank Mizuki Murakami (Shumei University) and Seike Kazuma (Saitama Museum of Natural History), graduate and undergraduate students of Hirano Laboratory, and all of the staff of the Department of Earth Sciences, School of Education, Waseda University for their valuable discussions, support, and warm encouragement. The authors are grateful to Brito M. Paulo (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro), and anonymous referees who reviewed this paper and provided many valuable comments and suggestions that helped improve the final version. This study was partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP26400506 to Y. Yabumoto.
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