INTRODUCTION

Lanzhou Basin in central Gansu Province, northern China, is relatively unknown in vertebrate paleontology but has attracted considerable attention during the 1990s because of its potential to fill a critical gap in fossil record in the early Miocene and because of its location along the northeastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau. Located just north of the city of Lanzhou (Figure 1), the Lanzhou Basin received terrestrial sediments during a substantial part of the early through late Cenozoic, although vertebrate fossils are mainly found in the early Oligocene through middle Miocene part of the section. A multinational, multidisciplinary team led by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology investigated the vertebrate paleontology and magnetostratigraphy of the Lanzhou Basin for several field seasons (Qiu et al. 1997; Flynn et al. 1999; Qiu et al. 2001). Vertebrate records during the early Miocene are rather scarce in Asia, and this is especially true for carnivorous mammals (creodonts and carnivorans). Our newly acquired Lanzhou carnivore collections, although still far too sketchy to permit a full picture of the community, appear to represent a unique assemblage, including either first records in China or last record of a lineage. Various groups of fossils vertebrates and invertebrates from the Lanzhou Basin have been described (Qiu and Xie 1997; Qiu et al. 1998; Qiu and Wang 1999; Xie 1999; Qiu 2000; B. Wang and Qiu 2000a, 2000b; Qiu 2001a, 2001b; Wang et al. 2001). This report is part of this effort and presents a systematic description of these carnivorous mammals.

Abbreviations: IVPP, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing; PIN, Institute of Paleontology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; PSS, Paleontology and Stratigraphy Section of Geological Institute, Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Ulaanbaatar.