The first Cenozoic mammal fauna from the Chilean Altiplano

Despite its richness, South America's Cenozoic mammal record is strongly biased geographically towards a small portion of the continent, mainly Patagonia. The rapidly growing list of major Cenozoic localities at lower latitudes thus marks a significant advance in our understanding of mammalian evolution in South America (see summaries in Flynn and Swisher, 1995; Flynn and Wyss, 1998). This paper reports the discovery of the first Cenozoic mammal fauna known from the Chilean Altiplano. It is part of an ongoing collaborative effort to sample faunas of a variety of ages across a large latitudinal transect of western South America, the goal of which is to elucidate temporal patterns of provincialism within the continent, as well as the tectonic and uplift history of the Andes Mountains and associated paleoenvi