InfoHub - Paleontology of Porcupines

As everyone knows, porcupines are quill bearing rodents that can cause pain to attackers. Before discussing the paleontology of these creatures, it is important to mention a basic fact about them. There are two families:

Erethizontidae - New World porcupines

Hystricidae - Old World porcupines

Erethizontidae fossils indicate that this family has lived during these geologic periods:

Oligocene - 38-26 million years ago
Miocene - 26-7 million years ago
Pliocene - 7-2 million years ago
Pleistocene - 2 million-50,000 years ago
Recent - 50,000 years ago to present

Erethizontidae porcupines have existed from the Oligocene to Recent in South America. North American fossils of them go back to the late Pliocene. Thus the fossil record indicates that these porcupines migrated north and reached North America sometime during the Pliocene.
In discussing Hystricidae (i.e. Old World porcupines), I will cite a portion of text from this article.

From the Old World to the New World: A Molecular Chronicle of the Phylogeny and Biogeography of Hystricognath Rodents

Dorothy Huchon and Emmanuel J.P. Douzery

Laboratoire de Paleontologie Paleobiologie et Phylogenie -CC064, Institute des Sciences de l'Evolution UMR 5554-CNRS, Universite Montpelier Il, Place E. Bataillon, 34095 Montpelier Cedex 05, France

Received October 10, 2000, revised February 14, 2001

These excerpts are pertinent to the paleontology of the Hystricidae:

"Hystricidae rodents include Old World Phiomorpha and New World Caviomorpha. These two groups have an enigmatic biogeographical history. Using a nuclear marker, the exam 28 of the von Willebrand Factor gene (vWT), we reconstructed the phylogenetic relationships among the 23 Hystricognathi species. These taxa encompass the complete familial diversity of the Hystriocognathi. Our results indicate a basal trifurcation of hystriocognaths leading to Hystricidae, Phiomorpha s.s (Bastricidae, Thryonomyidae and Petromuridae), and Caviomorpha."

"Hystricidae is the most enigmatic. It presents many ancestral characters, but their predecessors are unknown and the earliest fossils are recorded only since the early Miocene of Europe (Mackenna and Bell, 1997). However, paleontologists hypothesized that hystricids have an Asian or Indian origin (e.g. Hussain et al. 1978; Wood, 1985; Winkler, 1994)."

"Hystricidae fossils are only known since the Miocene, when they appear simaltaneously in Asia, Europe, and Africa (Mackenna and Bell, 1997) vWF sequences indicated that the origin of the group is much older than the Miocene and is possibly of the Eocene age."

[Note - The Eocene was 54-38 million years ago.]

Porcupine fossils of the species Hystrix sp. have been found in the Upper Miocene locale in the African country of Chad. A report given by a joint expeditions tells of the presence of those fossilized remains. The research was done in terms of a cooperative effort by these organizations:

Universite de Poitiers, Poitiers, France

Peabody Museum, Harvard University

Centre National Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France

Neal Robbins

P.S. Two examples of late Pliocene species of Erethizontidae are:

Erethizon kleini (M.K. Frazier 1981)

E. poyeri (Richard C. Hulbert 1997)

[Note - Fossils of both of these species are in the Florida Museum of Natural History.]