† Ganawamaya SPECIES SCORED: † Ganawamaya gillespieae. GEOLOGICAL PROVENANCE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Quantum Leap Site (Riversleigh Faunal Zone B), Riversleigh World Heritage Area, Queensland, Australia. AGE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Riversleigh Faunal Zone B is interpreted to be early Miocene based on biostratigraphy (see above). In the absence of radiometric dates, we have assumed the entire span of the early Miocene (Aquitanian to Burdigalian; Cohen et al., 2013 [updated]) for this terminal. ASSIGNED AGE RANGE: 23.030 –15.970 Mya. REMARKS: We scored † Ganawamaya gillespieae, the second balbarid included in our taxon sample, based on the holotype (QM F35432), an almost complete cranium and associated mandibles from the Quantum Leap Site of Riversleigh Faunal Zone B (Kear et al., 2007). One of the two paratypes of † G. gillespieae (AR 15347) is known from the older (Riversleigh Faunal Zone A) White Hunter Site, but neither this nor the other paratype (AR 12829) from the Riversleigh Faunal Zone B Wayne’s Wok Site was consulted for scoring purposes here. Kear et al. (2007) originally described this taxon as a species of † Nambaroo, but we follow Butler et al. (2018), who assigned it to † Ganawamaya. Our current understanding of the evolutionary relationships of balbarids is summarized above (see † Balbaroo).

Published as part of Beck, Robin M. D., Voss, Robert S. & Jansa, Sharon A., 2022, Craniodental Morphology And Phylogeny Of Marsupials, pp. 1-353 in Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2022 (457) on page 338, DOI: 10.1206/0003-0090.457.1.1, http://zenodo.org/record/6971356