Machairodus horribilis Schlosser，1903头骨材料记述

DESCRIPTION OF SKULL MATERIAL OF MACHAIRODUS HORRIBILIS SCHLOSSER,1903

Schlosser于1903年根据不明地点的零散牙齿所创建的Machairodus horribilis种一直没有得到古生物学家们的认同。最近发现了产自山西保德的两个剑齿虎头骨及一件下颌。其中的ml和M.horribilis者在大小和形态上都非常接近,据此把上述新材料归入了M.horribi- lis。在与中国及欧洲已知各种对比后,确信M.horribilis应为一有效种。

Machairodus horribilis was erected by Schlosser in 1903, based on isolated teeth purchased from some species M. drugstores in China. Zdansky attributed some of these teeth （P4 and C？） to his new palanderi, but left the others （incisors, p4 and ml ） as specifically indeterminate （Zdansky, 1924：115）. Otherwise, few paleontologists paid attention to Schlosser＇s species at all. While curating the Chinese Hipparion fauna fossils in IVPP during the early 1990 ＇s, the senior author of the present paper accidentally found two machairodont skulls collected from Baode in 1965, still unprepared. One of them turned out to be a perfectly preserved skull, while the other, a larger one, though only about half preserved, was associated with its mandible. Both were exceptionally large and possessed features shared exclusively by them. It was of particular interest that the ml of the 2^nd skull seemed considerably close to that of Schlosser＇s M. horribilis in size and morphology. This renders it plausible to refer these two skulls to M. horribilis, and this would, in turn, rehabilitate Schlosser＇s M. horribilis. The other reason for presenting the present paper now is the recently emerged possibility of making more detailed comparison between the Chinese and the classical European Machairodus species. For this we owe much to the two recently published articles on the skulls and mandibles of M. aphanistus and M. giganteus