Understanding the Taphonomy and taxonomy of a New Fossil Assemblage of Proboscideans from Hathnora, Madhya Pradesh, India

Abstract

Proboscidean fossils from India have been discovered and studied since the 19th century. While the Narmada basin of central India is highly fossiliferous, discoveries of abundant skeletal elements of proboscideans in minimally-disturbed contexts are rare, with the majority of the collections being isolated fragments recovered from surface contexts. Here, we present a new fossil assemblage from the fossil hominin site of Hathnora, which was found to contain multiple skeletal elements such as ribs, humerus, vertebrae, etc. of a proboscidean, possibly all belonging to a single individual. The quality of preservation and the reasonably large number of fossil bones provides us with an excellent opportunity to perform multidimensional analysis. Preliminary taphonomic observations shed light on the post-depositional history of the skeleton to correlate it with the fossil hominin findspot nearby (though both are stratigraphically independent and spatially separate). This study adds another piece to the puzzle of the evolutionary history of Proboscideans in India.