About this site

This site is a product of more than 35 years of literature research on Paleocene mammals. I'm an avocational paleontologist living in the south of Germany. I have been fascinated by the evolution of mammals since my early youth. My interest soon focused on the interval in which mammals rose to dominance, the Paleocene. This critical epoch was, however, poorly covered by the popular literature which was then available to me. To find out more, I started to exploit the resources of the local university library. I first learnt how professional paleontology looks like when I came across Matthew's monumental "Paleocene faunas of the San Juan Basin". Such technical stuff was a of course tough for a boy of thirteen, which I was then. Yet it was through works like this that I gradually became familiar with things like the complex structure of mammal teeth and the subtleties of zoological nomenclature. Though I later chose to study engineering, which is now my profession, the study of Paleocene mammals has always continued to be a fascinating occupation in my spare time.

To organize the information extracted from the literature, I started to compile a list of Paleocene vertebrates in 1985, first on paper, later using the cardfile tool that came with the early versions of Windows. For the mammals, my real area of interest and expertise, I finally transferred the list into a set of HTML documents in order to make it available on the internet. This compilation formed the core of my website when I first installed it in October 2000, and I keep updating it according to new research results (though less frequently in recent years). Lists on Paleocene birds, reptiles and amphibians were added early in 2006. Time for my hobby and access to the latest information are both limited, so some time can pass until new publications are taken into account in this directory. Nevertheless, the list should be quite complete for mammal genera and species described until the year 2000. Following suggestions from visitors of my site, I have also started writing a series of summary articles on the Paleocene fauna, in which treat some major groups of mammals (and some other vertebrates).

In 2008 I had the opportunity to get directly involved in research on Paleocene mammals by enrolling besides my regular job in a diploma in Life and Earth Sciences (Scíences de la víe et de la terre) at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes in France (EPHE), which I completed in 2015 under the guidance of Prof. Marc Godinot at the Muséum National d´Histoire Naturelle in Paris. My diploma included the study of a new Late Paleocene micromammal locality, Montchenot, in the Paris Basin, at which I also participated in collecting. This study included material from collections made by several amateur paleontologists, especially those of Jean-Louis Pellouin, Dominique Delsate, and Alain Phélizon It inspired further work on different aspects of Late Paleocene European micromammals, in particular on the primate-like Plesiadapidae, and on their relationships to related mammals from the Late Paleocene of North America. First publications resultings from my research, including the description of a new plesiadapid species, Plesiadapis berruensis, are available on ResearchGate, and further contributions are in work. Since I am now mainly focussing on this research in my paleontological activities, there has been not so much time for updating this website. Nevertheless I plan to continue updating it from time to time.

If you are an expert on early mammals, you can support my work by sending publications related to Paleocene mammals and by reporting any errors or omissions in the material presented here. I would also be grateful to native-speakers for improving the English of my summary articles. Just contact me in these cases.

One final personal word: After many years of studying the fossil record on early mammals, I am convinced that evolution is in fact the mechanism that, from a scientific point of view, explains what we see now recorded in the rocks. This is for me fully compatible with my Christian beliefs, and this site is also my own way of praising the Lord for the wonderful complexity of his creation.

Martin Jehle, September 2024

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