Scalabrinitherium
Scalabrinitherium is an extinct genus of mammals of the family Macraucheniidae. Fossils of this animal were found among the fossils of prehistoric xenarthrans in the Ituzaingó Formation of Argentina.
Description
This animal was rather similar to a llama with a slightly heavy build; the skull was long and low, the front teeth were slightly spatulate, and the nasal aperture set far back. It is possible that there was a strong prehensile lip or a short proboscis. The shortening of the nasal aperture was not as extreme as that of later macrauchenids. The orbit too had not fully moved behind the teeth, as in the more derived members of the clade. The height of this animal must have exceeded two meters; the limbs were slender but relatively heavy, three-toed. Scalabrinitherium had brachyodont teeth, and upper molars less derived than those of Macrauchenia.Classification
The first paleontologist to describe the fossils of this animal was Bravard, who in 1858 attributed the fossils to a presumed South American species of the perissodactyl Palaeotherium, P. paranense. It was the Argentinean paleontologist Florentino Ameghino, in 1883, who described the genus Scalabrinitherium for this species, also describing the new species S. bravardi in the fauna of Entre Rios which dates to the Late Miocene. Later, in 1885, the same author described an additional species, S. rothii. Ameghino had a tendency to misspell the names of his taxa, which is the case with Scalabrinitherium, which has been spelled as Scalibrinitherium in older literature.Scalabrinitherium was a rather derived representative of the Macraucheniidae, a group of litopterns with a camel-like appearance. Probably derived from lower Miocene forms such as Cramauchenia and Theosodon, this animal probably gave rise to the large macraucheniids of the Pliocene and Pleistocene, such as Macrauchenia and Xenorhinotherium.
Cladogram based in the phylogenetic analysis published by Schmidt et al., 2014, showing the position of Scalabrinitherium: