With few notable exceptions, mammalian faunas from the latest Paleocene of North America (Clarkforkian North American Land Mammal Age, approximately 57 to 55.7 Ma) are poorly known, with the vast majority recovered from a single area, the Bighorn Basin of northwestern Wyoming. Comparably aged faunas elsewhere are few. Here we describe new material, including several previously undocumented species, from the Buckman Hollow local fauna from the Green River Basin of southwestern Wyoming. Newly documented occurrences include the multituberculate Neoliotomus conventus, the oxyaenid creodont Dipsalidictis, and a rare phenacodontid condylarth Ectocion cf. E. major. Although sparse, these additions offer the opportunity to reevaluate biostratigraphic and biogeographic patterns observed among latest Paleocene faunas, which include differing mammalian co-occurrence patterns in these more southerly faunas than seen in the Bighorn Basin. © Society for Vertebrate Paleontology April 2014.

A new genus and species of an amphicyonid from the Bose Basin of Guangxi, south China, is short-jawed with relatively bunodont cheek teeth that are characterized by reduction in cusp number. This taxon is the oldest record of an amphicyonid from south Asia and possibly for all of Asia. Despite its antiquity, it is derived in the development of brachygnathy and differs from other early amphicyonids that have shortened faces. Evidently brachygnathy was established in this species without loss of p1-2 or m2-3, which became single-rooted from a primitive double-rooted condition.

Large-scale analysis of the fossil record requires aggregation of palaeontological data from individual fossil localities. Prior to computers, these synoptic datasets were compiled by hand, a laborious undertaking that took years of effort and forced palaeontologists to make difficult choices about what types of data to tabulate. The advent of desktop computers ushered in palaeontology's first digital revolution-online literature-based databases, such as the Paleobiology Database (PBDB). However, the published literature represents only a small proportion of the palaeontological data housed in museum collections. Although this issue has long been appreciated, the magnitude, and thus potential significance, of these so-called 'dark data' has been difficult to determine. Here, in the early phases of a second digital revolution in palaeontology--the digitization of museum collections-we provide an estimate of the magnitude of palaeontology's dark data. Digitization of our nine institutions' holdings of Cenozoic marine invertebrate collections from California, Oregon and Washington in the USA reveals that they represent 23 times the number of unique localities than are currently available in the PBDB. These data, and the vast quantity of similarly untapped dark data in other museum collections, will, when digitally mobilized, enhance palaeontologists' ability to make inferences about the patterns and processes of past evolutionary and ecological changes.