Materials and Methods

Specimens described here were collected over the course of field campaigns from the years 1975 to early 1997. Most were found as a consequence of an intensive effort to document the microfauna from the Siwaliks that included screening large quantities of fossiliferous sediment to retrieve teeth and other fossils of small mammals. In the process, bulk samples of sediment yielding small bones were passed through screens to sort out fossil remains. This process sometimes yielded lagomorph teeth and bones. However, lagomorphs, being large (among small mammals), also were recovered by careful prospecting of fossil localities. Searches conducted on hands and knees produced as many leporids as did screening. Nowhere were lagomorphs abundant. Some localities produced several fossils, but as will be seen below, separate elements quite conceivably represented single individuals in life. Thus, it appears that leporids truly are rarely encountered in Siwalik fossil localities.

Leporid tooth terminology for p3 (the most diagnostic tooth position recovered from the Siwaliks; no P2s, another diagnostic tooth position, were recovered) is illustrated in Figure 2. Measurements of the teeth were made using a reticule in a Wild M5 stereomicroscope. For measurement, teeth were held so that the occlusal surface was perpendicular to the table supporting the microscope. Illustrations of the occlusal surface of each tooth were made with the tooth in the same orientation used for measurement. Pencil drawings were made by YT using a camera lucida. Final illustrations were made by tracing these pencil drawings using Adobe Illustrator CS2.

Institutional Abbreviations. BMNH, Natural History Museum, London, England. DP, Dartmouth-Peshawar, localities and fossils found during a collaborative program between universities at Dartmouth and Peshawar, Lamont Geological Observatory, and the University of Arizona. GSP, Geological Survey of Pakistan, the repository for the material reported here. Casts will be made available at Southern Methodist University, National Science Museum, Tokyo, and Harvard University. IVPP, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing, China. IMNH, Idaho Museum of Natural History, Idaho State University, Pocatello, Idaho; Y, Yale, a prefix in the system of locality designations developed in the 1970s at Yale University.

Anatomical Abbreviations. p3, AER, anteroexternal reentrant (= protoflexid); AIR, anterointernal reentrant (= paraflexid); AR, anterior reentrant (= anteroflexid); PER, posteroexternal reentrant (= hypoflexid); PIR, posterointernal reentrant (= mesoflexid), TH, thick enamel on posterior border of trigonid; TN, thin enamel on anterior border of talonid. Tooth terminology is modified from White (1991).