Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Palaeoworld 27 (2018) 410–414 New palaeobatrachid records from Asia E.V. Syromyatnikova a,b,* a Borissiak Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Profsoyuznaya Street 123, 117647 Moscow, Russia b Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Universitetskaya Embankment 1, 199034 St. Petersburg, Russia Received 27 March 2018; received in revised form 20 April 2018; accepted 11 May 2018 Available online 17 May 2018 Abstract This paper describes fossil remains of palaeobatrachid frogs from the Lower Pleistocene of Baturino (south Trans-Ural region) and the lower Pliocene of Rostovka (Western Siberia) localities. The palaeobatrachid remains from Baturino and Rostovka do not show any taxonomically relevant characters and are assigned to Palaeobatrachidae indet. The described remains are the second and youngest occurrence of the family outside Europe. These records show that the geographic distribution of Palaeobatrachidae during the late Cenozoic was much wider than previously known and included an extensive trans-Eurasian area. © 2018 Elsevier Ireland Ltd Elsevier B.V. and Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, CAS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Palaeobatrachidae; Pliocene; Pleistocene; Western Siberia; Trans-Ural region; Russia 1. Introduction Palaeobatrachidae Cope, 1865 is a family of extinct anurans widely known in Europe (Rage and Roˇ cek, 2003; Roˇ cek, 2013) and consists of two genera (Palaeobatrachus Tschudi, 1838 and Albionbatrachus Meszoely, ˇ Spinar et Ford, 1984) with about 13 species. Most of the species belong to Palaeobatrachus, but tax- onomy of this genus and its relationships with Albionbatrachus remain unclear. Wuttke et al. (2012) consider Albionbatrachus (and also Pliobatrachus) a young synonym of Palaeobatrachus. However, Roˇ cek et al. (2015), on the basis of micro-computer tomography studies of the Palaeobatrachidae frontoparietals, have corroborated that Albionbatrachus is a distinct genus from Palaeobatrachus. This last assertion is followed in our work. The palaeobatrachid records are known from the Late Cretaceous (e.g., Buffetaut et al., 1996; Blain et al., 2010; Blanco et al., 2015; Szentesi and Company, 2016) to the middle Pleistocene (Sanchiz and Szyndlar, 1984; Ratnikov, 1993, 1996, 1997, 2002; Roˇ cek et al., 2006; Wuttke et al., 2012). Until recently, the palaeoba- trachid distribution was restricted to Europe, except for a few * Correspondence to: Borissiak Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Profsoyuznaya Street 123, 117647 Moscow, Russia. E-mail address: sev@paleo.ru records of Palaeobatrachus sp. from the early Miocene and, pos- sibly, Pleistocene of Anatolia (Claessens, 1997; van den Hoek Ostende et al., 2015). It was believed that palaeobatrachids have never extended beyond the Ural Mountains to the East. Their easternmost European record comes from the Apastovo locality (late Pliocene, MN16; Tatarstan, Russia; Ratnikov, 1997; Wuttke et al., 2012). However, a record (as Palaeobatrachidae indet.) was recently described from the late Miocene (MN 13) of southern Western Siberia (Novaya Stanitsa 1A locality; Vasilyan et al., 2016). Although represented only by a single bone (spheneth- moid), it is the first occurrence of the family outside Europe. Moreover, the palaeobatrachid from Novaya Stanitsa 1A falls within the late Miocene (NM 10–13) palaeobatrachid gap of the European record. Based on this remain, the reappearance of Palaeobatrachidae in Europe (since the beginning of MN 14) was explained by migration of these frogs from Siberia near the Mio–Pliocene boundary (Vasilyan et al., 2016). Therefore, any new data on the Trans-Uralian palaeobatrachids will have an important bearing on the paleobiogeographic history of the group. In this paper we describe new material of Palaeobatra- chidae outside Europe. The remains come from two localities: Baturino in south Trans-Ural region and Rostovka in Western Siberia (Figs. 1 and 2; see Section 2). Though fragmentary, these remains are the youngest occurrence (Early Pleistocene) of the https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palwor.2018.05.002 1871-174X/© 2018 Elsevier Ireland Ltd Elsevier B.V. and Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, CAS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.