Dietary reconstruction of Plio-Pleistocene proboscideans from the Carpathian Basin of Romania using enamel microwear

Haiduc, Bogdan Stelian; Rățoi, Bogdan Gabriel; Semprebon, Gina M.

doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2018.01.039

Cited by 11 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…To date, there is an increasing number of studies evidencing a eurybiomic and generalist pattern in proboscidean behavior ( 39 ). In this context, as suggested for mastodons and mammoths from North America ( 31 ), a change in vegetation may have not been a determining and fatal factor in the extinction of South American gomphotheres.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiproxy evidence for leaf-browsing and closed habitats in extinct proboscideans (Mammalia, Proboscidea) from Central Chile

González-Guarda

Petermann-Pichincura

Tornero

et al. 2018

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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SignificanceThe multiproxy approach represents a novel methodology and a unique opportunity to obtain a more detailed view of ancient resource use. Our multiproxy study, carried out on gomphotheres from Chile, widens potential occupied habitats to closed-canopy forests. This habitat variability supports the hypothesis that the diet of gomphotheres appears to be more constrained by resource availability than by the potential dietary range. We strongly recommend the use of a multiproxy approach, where morphology analyses are complemented by other sources of information. This approach prevents misleading conclusions about the origin of the proxy’s signal from arising, such as a leaf-browsing diet inferred from the dental calculus and microwear not necessarily being indicative of humidity.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiproxy evidence for leaf-browsing and closed habitats in extinct proboscideans (Mammalia, Proboscidea) from Central Chile

González-Guarda

Petermann-Pichincura

Tornero

et al. 2018

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…The same flexibility in food exploitation is also observable in extant cervids such as the red deer (Cervus elaphus) (Gebert and Verheyden-Tixier, 2001), the sika deer (Cervus nippon) (Takatsuki, 2009;Kubo et al, 2014) or in the modern chital (Axis axis) (Sankar and Acharya, 2004). Dietary flexibility has been also demonstrated in a large variety of extinct herbivorous mammals (including deer, giraffids, dromomerycids, proboscideans, antilocaprids, etc) across their range (Solounias et al, 1988;Solounias and Moelleken, 1994;Semprebon et al, 2004;Rivals et al, 2009Rivals et al, , 2012DeMiguel et al, 2008DeMiguel et al, , 2010Kahlke and Kaiser, 2011;Rivals and Semprebon, 2011;Haiduc et al, 2018, Strani et al, 2018, probably as a response to environmental shifts and changing environments (DeMiguel et al, 2010). The leptobovine lineage assumes consistently a grass-dominated mixed feeding behaviour in both localities, whereas G. meneghinii displays a more abrasive diet in Olivola than in CSG.…”

Section: Accepted Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dietary response of early Pleistocene ungulate communities to the climate oscillations of the Gelasian/Calabrian transition in Central Italy

Strani

DeMiguel

Bellucci

et al. 2018

Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology

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Climatic oscillations at the Gelasian/Calabrian transition modified terrestrial palaeoenvironmental settings in the European region. A gradual drop in global temperatures beginning about 2.7 Ma led to drier conditions and to a reduction in, and subsequent disappearance of, subtropical vegetation in the central Mediterranean area by ca 1.2 Ma. Large ungulates are sensitive to vegetation changes and faced with harsher environmental settings may shift their feeding strategies to exploit available food resources in different ecosystems. In fossil assemblages such dietary adaptations are reflected by tooth morphology (a phylogenetic signal) and tooth wear degree (a direct signal of the species' diet). In this paper, we investigate how large herbivores responded to palaeoenvironmental changes that occurred at the passage between the Gelasian and Calabrian ages in the Italian Peninsula, analysing the dental wear patterns and hypsodonty of the early Pleistocene fossil ungulates assemblage of Olivola (Aulla, Central Italy). We found that while

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“…An illustrative case concerns proboscideans in Europe and North America. Except for the last 0.01 million years, both continents have continuously harbored proboscideans throughout the last 18 and 16 million years, respectively, despite intense climate fluctuations (e.g., Fox and Fisher, 2004;Lucas and Morgan, 2005;Haiduc et al, 2018;von Koenigswald et al, 2023). The contrast between these earlier non-size-selective extinction patterns and the strongly size-selective extinctions in the late Quaternary is a strong argument against a climatic causation.…”

Section: Climatic Causationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions: Patterns, causes, ecological consequences and implications for ecosystem management in the Anthropocene

Svenning,

Lemoine,

Bergman

et al. 2024

Camb. prisms Extinction

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Across the last ~50,000 years (the late Quaternary) terrestrial vertebrate faunas have experienced severe losses of large species (megafauna), with most extinctions occurring in the Late Pleistocene and Early to Middle Holocene. Debate on the causes has been ongoing for over 200 years, intensifying from the 1960s onward. Here, we outline criteria that any causal hypothesis needs to account for. Importantly, this extinction event is unique relative to other Cenozoic (the last 66 million years) extinctions in its strong size bias. For example, only 11 out of 57 species of megaherbivores (body mass ≥1,000 kg) survived to the present. In addition to mammalian megafauna, certain other groups also experienced substantial extinctions, mainly large non-mammalian vertebrates and smaller but megafauna-associated taxa. Further, extinction severity and dates varied among continents, but severely affected all biomes, from the Arctic to the tropics. We synthesise the evidence for and against climatic or modern human (Homo sapiens) causation, the only existing tenable hypotheses. Our review shows that there is little support for any major influence of climate, neither in global extinction patterns nor in fine-scale spatiotemporal and mechanistic evidence. Conversely, there is strong and increasing support for human pressures as the key driver of these extinctions, with emerging evidence for an initial onset linked to pre-sapiens hominins prior to the Late Pleistocene. Subsequently, we synthesize the evidence for ecosystem consequences of megafauna extinctions and discuss the implications for conservation and restoration. A broad range of evidence indicates that the megafauna extinctions have elicited profound changes to ecosystem structure and functioning. The late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions thereby represent an early, large-scale human-driven environmental transformation, constituting a progenitor of the Anthropocene, where humans are now a major player in planetary functioning. Finally, we conclude that megafauna restoration via trophic rewilding can be expected to have positive effects on biodiversity across varied Anthropocene settings.

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Dietary reconstruction of Plio-Pleistocene proboscideans from the Carpathian Basin of Romania using enamel microwear

Cited by 11 publications

References 49 publications

Multiproxy evidence for leaf-browsing and closed habitats in extinct proboscideans (Mammalia, Proboscidea) from Central Chile

Multiproxy evidence for leaf-browsing and closed habitats in extinct proboscideans (Mammalia, Proboscidea) from Central Chile

Dietary response of early Pleistocene ungulate communities to the climate oscillations of the Gelasian/Calabrian transition in Central Italy

The late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions: Patterns, causes, ecological consequences and implications for ecosystem management in the Anthropocene

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