We now move to another mesonychian group: Hapalodectidae. This
is yet another of those obscure little groups that sounds really
interesting, yet are never the subject of focus or discussion.
Virtually all of the literature on them – and that’s still only
ten papers or so – mentions the idea that they might have been
piscivorous, but I can’t find any elaboration of this and would
like to see some. Hapalodectidae was named by Szalay & Gould
(1966) as a mesonychid ‘subfamily’ (following Ting & Li (1987)
and others, I here refer to the group as Hapalodectidae instead
of Hapalodectinae); it’s a small group containing about five
genera (or does it? Read on) from North America and eastern
Asia, the best known of which is Hapalodectes. Five species of
this genus have been named (H. leptognathus and H. anthracinus
from North America, and H. serus, H. hetangensis and a new, as
yet unnamed species, all from Asia). Remains of Hapalodectes had
first been reported in 1892 (when they were included within the
mesonychid genu