Early branching among basal murine rodents with the description of a new genus

The Siwalik record includes the oldest stem representatives of the Murinae, and notably the genus Progonomys, the oldest known murine genus that dispersed broadly across the Old World. In this study we erect a new Siwalik murine genus to clarify the content of the genus Progonomys. This new genus elucidates an early stem, a hitherto unrecognized branch of the subfamily Murinae. While it did not disperse as Progonomys did, so far as known, it attests to southern Asia’s real and potential significance to early murine diversity and as one source of the Indo-Malayan dispersal of murine rodents.