Veratalpa lugdunensiana is a fossil mammal from the Miocene of France. Known from a single astragalus (a footbone), the species was assigned to its own genus, Veratalpa, by Florentino Ameghino in 1905. He placed it in Talpidae, the family of the moles, but in 1974, John Howard Hutchison argued that the astragalus was not talpid and more likely came from a rodent. The astragalus is about 4.5 mm long, broad for a talpid, and has the head oriented farther from the axis of the foot than in talpids. Taxonomy Argentine naturalist Florentino Ameghino described Veratalpa in an overview of the astragali from the middle Miocene of Vieux Collonges in France. The astragalus is a bone of the foot that is part of the ankle joint. He listed several species of the family Talpidae (moles and related species) from Vieux Collonges, including "espèce C" ("species C"), which he named as a new genus and species, Veratalpa lugdunensiana, in a footnote. In a 1906 review of Ameghino's paper, Édouard Louis Trouessart affirmed that Veratalpa probably represented a new genus of mole, but noted that the specific name lugdunensiana would have been more correctly written "lugdunensis". According to Trouessart, the suffix -ana is appropriate for names that reference persons, but not for those that refer to places, such as this name, which is derived from Lugdunum (the Latin name for Lyon). In a 1974 review of Miocene European talpids, John Howard Hutchison wrote that the astragalus of Veratalpa lacked any features that would ally it with talpids and commented that it was most likely a rodent. In their 1997 Classification of Mammals, Malcolm McKenna and Susan Bell listed Veratalpa as a member of Placentalia of uncertain affinities. Description The astragalus of Veratalpa is the largest among those from Vieux Collonges that Ameghino assigned to Talpidae. Although at 4.5 mm it is about as long as his "species A", it is broader, and Hutchison noted the broadness as one of the characters that argue against classification of Veratalpa in Talpidae. Like living moles, it has a broad, flat, and short head, but it forms a noticeably small angle with the body—in actual moles, the head is more axially oriented (i.e., towards the central axis of the foot). The surface of the head that contacts the navicula is less rounded than in moles. The body is low and nearly square and has a diameter of