TAXONOMY AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE ANATOLIAN HIPPOPOTAMIDAE FAMILY IN THE LIGHT OF PALEONTOLOGICAL FINDING
Project no. 23043 · Status: Kapanmış · 2021
Summary
<p>The fact that there are very few researchers working on mammalian and Anatolian Quaternary vertebrate paleontology in Turkey has led to the negligible number of scientific studies that will cover these deposits and possible new ones in our country, which has very rich mammalian fossil beds. Within the scope of this thesis, a systematic paleontology study was carried out using biometric and morphological methods and "Unsupervised Machine Learning" analysis of Hippopotamidae fossils obtained from the Anatolian Pleistocene localities, Karain Cave and Muğla-Datça. At the same time, Anatolian fossil Hippopotamus findings were obtained by evaluating the "Burdur-Kocakır-2" and "Konya-Dursunlu" faunas, which are known to contain Hippopotamidae fossils from previous studies. Studying the vertebrate fossil localities of Anatolia, which sees a bridge between Europe and Africa, is at a key point. Knowing the possible migration routes of the Hippopotamidae family will also enable us to understand the evolutionary processes of this family and hominins that share the same ecology with this family. In this study, the first "<em>Hippopotamus antiquus</em>" and "<em>Hippopotamus amphibius</em>" species of Anatolia were identified. In addition, the palaeogeographic distribution of the genus Hippopotamus in Anatolia was compared with the Eurasian fauna. This study will shed light on the evolutionary processes of <em>Hippopotamus </em>species in Anatolian Quaternary.</p>