Bramatherium
Extinct genus of mammals
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bramatherium (Brahma’s beast) is an extinct genus of giraffids that ranged from India to Turkey in Asia. It is closely related to the larger Sivatherium.
| Bramatherium | |
|---|---|
| Bramatherium perimense skull | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Artiodactyla |
| Family: | Giraffidae |
| Genus: | †Bramatherium Falconer, 1845 |
| Species | |
| |
Etymology
Description
Taxonomy
In 2025, Kostantis Laskos and colleagues described two ossicones of B. perimense from the Fourka locality of the Greek Chalkidiki Peninsula, close to localities which have yielded the giraffid Helladotherium. They concluded that Helladotherium should be synonymized with Bramatherium based on their overlapping distribution, nearly identical anatomy, and presumed occupation of comparable ecological niches. This synonymy had similarly been suspected by previous researchers.[3] Laskos and colleagues suggested that the lack of ossicones found for Helladatherium had prevented previous phylogenetic analyses from recovering their close relationship. Furthermore, these researchers only recognized two valid and distinct species of Bramatherium, the larger B. grande and the smaller B. perimense, with characters previously thought to be distinctive between all other species simply due to intraspecific variation.[4]