Abstract
We report fossils of the darter Anhinga pannonica Lambrecht, 1916 from two late Miocene (Tortonian, 11.62 and 11.44 Ma) avifaunas in Southern Germany. The material from the hominid locality Hammerschmiede near Pforzen represents the most comprehensive record of this species and includes most major postcranial elements except for the tarsometatarsus. We furthermore show that the putative cormorant Phalacrocorax brunhuberi (von Ammon, 1918) from the middle Miocene of Regensburg-Dechbetten is another, previously misclassified, record of A. pannonica, and this may also be true for early Miocene fossils described as P. intermedius Milne-Edwards, 1867. A. pannonica was distinctly larger than extant darters and reached the size of A. grandis from the late Miocene of North America. We detail that only fossils from the Miocene of Europe and Africa can be referred to A. pannonica, whereas putative records from Asia fall within the size range of extant darters. A. pannonica appears to have been a long-living species (16 to 6 Ma) with an extensive distribution from the equator to the northern mid-latitudes. The extinction of large-sized darters in Europe is likely to have been due to climatic cooling in the late Neogene, but the reasons for their disappearance in Africa and South America remain elusive.
Highlights
Darters or snakebirds (Anhingidae) are the sister taxon of cormorants (Phalacrocoracidae) and include four extant species of highly aquatic birds, which occur in tropical and subtropical freshwater habitats of the Americas (Anhinga anhinga), Africa (A. rufa), Asia (A. melanogaster), and the Australian region (A. novaehollandiae) [1, 2]
A species that was distinctly larger than all extant darters, Anhinga grandis, was reported from the late Miocene of Nebraska and Florida [15, 16]; tentative records of A. grandis were described from the late Miocene/early Miocene of Brazil [6] and the middle Miocene of Colombia [17]
The specimens from the Hammerschmiede clay pit are assigned to Anhinga pannonica, which is the only previously described species of the Anhingidae from Europe
Summary
Darters or snakebirds (Anhingidae) are the sister taxon of cormorants (Phalacrocoracidae) and include four extant species of highly aquatic birds, which occur in tropical and subtropical freshwater habitats of the Americas (Anhinga anhinga), Africa (A. rufa), Asia (A. melanogaster), and the Australian region (A. novaehollandiae) [1, 2]. Most notable among the recent finds are fossils of the arboreal bipedal hominid Danuvius guggenmosi [38], but the vertebrate fossil record of the Hammerschmiede locality includes numerous other—from an extant European perspective—unusual vertebrate groups ([37]: Table 1), such as the giant urodele Andrias scheuchzeri, the latest records of the archosauromorph taxon Choristodera, and the bear Kretzoiarctos, which is a stem group representative of the Giant Panda [42] Both Hammerschmiede channel fills contain abundant and diverse fish fossils, especially from small to medium-sized species (standard length 10–20 cm), such as true catfish (Silurus), cypriniforms (loach, minnows, barbs, and others) and perciforms (perch, goby), indicating that these fluvial systems provided ample food resources for piscivorous darters. All of these fossils remain to be studied in detail, and in the present study we focus on the darter specimens
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