Miomachairodus
Miomachairodus is an extinct genus of large machairodontine containing only a single species, Miomachairodus pseudailuroides. It is mainly known from Middle Miocene-age fossils in Turkey and persisted until the early Late Miocene. Fossils of this machairodont have been found in the Vallesian-age Bahe Formation in Shaanxi, China, and Yeni Eskihisar in Anatolia. This Turkish site is of Miocene age and is well known for its pollen studies.
History and naming
The genus was first named by paleontologist Norbert Schmidt-Kittler in 1976 based on the holotype, a partial skull from Akçaköy, Eşme District, Turkey, and a second specimen, a lower jaw from Yeni Eskihisar. The generic name Miomachairodus is a combination of Mio, referring to the Miocene when it lived, and Machairodus; the specific name pseudailuroides means "like Pseudaelurus".In 2022, material from the Guanigou fauna in the Linxia Basin was described as Miomachairodus sp., and the authors suggested that it represented a new species of Miomachairodus. The fossil, a partial maxilla from the early Late Miocene, represented the oldest known machairodontine in Asia. They refrained from definitively naming the species because it lacked the fourth premolar. The fossil material had previously been assigned to Machairodus palanderi in 2013.