We would like to thank the following curators and collection managers for access to comparative material under their care:J.Chen,H.Si and H.Chen (IVPP),M.March and J.Galindo (ICP).We further thank Loic Costeur (NMB) for the pictures of Hoplictis noueli from Artenay housed at NBM,Serdar Mayda (Ege University) for the pictures of Hoplictis florancei from Erkertshofen 2 and Dehmictis vorax from Wintershof-West,and Jorge Morales (MNCN) for the measurements of Hoplictis noueli from Artenay and Hoplictis florancei from Pontlevoy,as well as pictures from Martes sansaniensis from Sansan.We also thank J.M.Robles and D.M.Alba (ICP) for their assistance with the ICP collections.We would also like to thank the people who participated in the fieldwork in the Ulungur River area,S.Xu and C.Suo.The current work was supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant Nos.XDA20070203,XDB26000000,QYZDY-SSW-DQC-22,GJHZ1885),the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos.41430102 and 41772018,41625005).The support of the DST-NFR Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences (CoE-Pal) toward this research for A.Valenciano (COE2018-09POST) is hereby acknowledged.Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the authors and are not necessarily to be attributed to the CoE.Finally,we thank Martin Pickford for improving the English and are also indebted to the Scientific editors Lian Liu and Susan Turner,the Editor-in-Chief Degan Shu,Fei Hongcai and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions,which have improved the original manuscript. （IVPP）