David P. Whistler's research while affiliated with Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and other places

... Camelidae are a family of the mammalian order Cetartiodactyla which originated in North America during the Middle Eocene (Honey et al., 1998;Scherer, 2013). The family became more diverse during the Miocene (Webb and Meachen, 2004), spreading to Asia and South America in the Pliocene (Paula-Couto, 1979;Whistler & Webb, 2005;Gasparini et al., 2017). The family became extinct in North America by the late Pleistocene (Honey et al., 1998;Kemp, 2005;Whistler & Webb, 2005;Scherer, 2013). ...

... 48-20 Ma), sample locations ( Fig. 2) were restricted to three sections with local paleontological, radiometric, and magnetostratigraphic control of depositional age. They included (1) a middle Eocene section in Simi Valley (exposed along View Lane Drive at the terminus of exit 22A of California Highway 118; Kelly et al., 1991;Kelly and Whistler, 1994;Lander, 2013); (2) the lower Miocene Piuma Member in the Saddle Peak area of the western Santa Monica Mountains (exposed along upper Piuma Road and upper Schueren Road, along and near the range crest) (Lander, 2011(Lander, , 2013; and (3) correlative lower Miocene strata in the Limestone Canyon Park area of the Santa Ana Mountains (Red Rock Canyon Trail and a nearby road cut through the "marker conglomerate" horizon on Santiago Canyon Road (Fig. 2). ...

... The gas exchange resembles respiration and is the reverse of photosynthesis where CO 2 is fixed and O 2 released [55]. The C4 pathway is an adaptation to the ancestral C3 photosynthetic pathway that acts to mitigate the effects of photorespiration that can occur in response to ecological pressures in C3 photosynthesis [56]. The first product of photorespiration is the phosphoglycolate, which is produced by enzyme Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase, and the final product of photorespiration is NH + 4 in the roots. ...

... Bulk enamel−δ 13 C values range from −11.4 to −5.0‰ with a mean of −8.9 ± 1.0‰ (n 56): 1) from −11.4 to −9.1‰ with a mean of −9.9 ± 0.75‰ (n 18) for Gazella; 2) from −9.2 to −8.1‰ with a mean of −8.5 ± 0.35‰ (n 12) for Chilotherium; 3) from −9.2 to −5.0‰ with a mean of −8.3 ± 0.86‰ (n 26) for Hipparion. Only one fossil (Hipparion) has bulk δ 13 C values greater than −6‰, a conservative cutoff for the presence of C 4 plants in the diets of fossil mammals (Bowman et al., 2017). When comparing our results with data from Wang and Deng (2005) and Biasatti et al. (2010), Biasatti et al. (2018) (Figure 6), we found that the taxon-specific mean δ 13 C values in the Xunhua Basin tend to be slightly higher than those in the Linxia Basin ( Figure 7). ...

... Our choice of the study area and time frame is pragmatic, as the Miocene of the contiguous USA contains a considerable number of well-studied fossil occurrences (Tedford et al. 1987;Tedford et al. 2004). Increasing the temporal resolution by dividing the Miocene into sub-epochs would result in a decrease in the quantity and spatial coverage of these occurrences. ...

... It has been reported from several localities: the Sespe Formation of the Simi Valley Landfill, Ventura County, California; the Slim Buttes Formation in Harding County, South Dakota; the Devils Graveyard Formation in Skyline and Cotter channels, Trans-Pecos Texas. A. bodei-bearing strata in above listed locilities are correlated to the Duchesnean NALMA (Stock, 1933(Stock, , 1939Bjork, 1967;Wilson and Schiebout, 1981;Kelly et al., 1991), which is accepted to be late Middle Eocene in age (Vandenberghe et al., 2012). Both A. parvidens and A. tholos were found at different localities in the Erlian Basin, Nei Mongol, China (Wall, 1981). ...

... Of these, only one, the sciurid Petauristodon, is known from Thomas Farm. However, the first appearance of Petauristodon is now known to have occurred earlier than the He2 (Whistler and Lander, 2003;MacFadden et al., 2014). Furthermore, fossils of the presumptive He2 taxon Petauristodon occur in the same or lower beds at Thomas Farm as the He1 taxa Menoceras and Floridaceras (see Appendix 1). ...

... The presence of several sminthid species in North America throughout the Oligocene and Miocene provides an important study system to better understand intercontinental dispersions of mammals from Eurasia, which have been suggested to be critical to the establishment of North American faunas (Hunt 2004;Tedford et al. 2004;Lindsay et al. 2016;Calede 2020). Such work requires the development of a phylogenetic framework. ...

... The Topanga Formation was originally based on a sequence of marine sandstones exposed in an anticline just west of Old Topanga Canyon in the central Santa Monica Mountains, California 28 . It has yielded abundant early to middle Miocene marine invertebrates and a few land mammals that are as old as early late Hemingfordian in age 29 . After the initial naming, the name of the formation was applied to a much thicker and heterogeneous sequence of sedimentary and volcanic rocks 30 . ...

... The present study extends the work of Perkins et al. (1995Perkins et al. ( , 1998 by focusing on the 12.08 Ma Ibex Hollow Tuff. The Ibex Hollow Tuff coincides in time with a Clarendonian subinterval boundary (Cl1/Cl2) of the North American Land Mammal Age (NALMA; Whistler et al., 2009;Tedford et al., 2004) and immediately precedes a late Miocene cooling period (Westerhold et al., 2020), a paleomagnetic transition (C5r.2n/C5An.1n; Ogg, 2012), and widespread micropaleontological transitions in the northern Pacific Ocean (Barron and Isaacs, 2001). ...