The remains of Mammuthus lamarmorai (Major, 1883) housed in the Naturhistorisches Museum of Basel (Switzerland) and the complete “Skeleton-Puzzle”

Daniel Zoboli

First

;Gian Luigi Pillola

Second

;Maria Rita Palombo

Last

2018-01-01

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Abstract

Mammuthus lamarmorai (Major, 1883) is the only dwarf proboscidean taxon known from the Pleistocene of Sardinia (Italy). The fossil record mainly consists of isolated remains reported from a few localities. The species was, however, created for an incomplete skeleton, the first finding of the taxon, fortuitously discovered at the end of the XIX century during the construction of a railway line crossing aeolian deposits cropping out near Funtana Morimenta (Gonnesa, south-western Sardinia). Since the discovery until the beginning of the XX century, various researchers repeatedly collected elephant bones at the site that they sent to various museums or private collectors. The available bone remains of the Funtana Morimenta elephant are currently housed in three museums (Naturhistorisches Museum of Basel, NMB, in Switzerland; Museo di Storia Naturale e del Territorio of Pisa, MSNT and Museo Sardo di Geologia e Paleontologia D. Lovisato of Cagliari, MDLCA, in Italy). The present paper aims to provide the complete list of the material collected by Forsyth Major during several excavation campaigns and currently housed in the NMB. A comparison of the lists of remains from the three museums allowed the authors to exclude the presence of duplicate elements and to attribute all the remains found at Funtana Morimenta to a single fully mature individual.