Ancestral foxes at the gates of Europe: the Pliocene fox from Çalta-1 (Turkey) and their relationships with Asian and European Plio-Pleistocene foxes

Abstract

The Pliocene record of genus Vulpes Frisch, 1775 in Eurasia is scarce, coming from few sparse localities. The lack of a comprehensive and integrated revision led to the description of numerous different taxa, often only tentatively related to extant species but not with one another. Çalta-1 is an important Pliocene site located in the Anatolian region of Turkey, dated to 4.0 Ma. In the present review, we reappraise the interesting record of Vulpes galatica Ginsburg, 1998. Morphological and ­morphometric evidence suggests a strong similarity between this taxon and the early Late Pliocene V. beihaiensis Qiu & Tedford, 1990, recovered from the Chinese Yushe Basin. Such evidence favors the parsimonious interpretation of synonymy between the two species, under the name V. beihaiensis. This hypothesis opens a new interpretation on the biogeography of the Pliocene-Early Pleistocene foxes of Eurasia. Vulpes beihaiensis links the Asian and European records, with its affinity to V. ­alopecoides (Del Campana, 1913) and, eventually, to the extant red fox (Vulpes vulpes (Linnaeus, 1758)).