Splendid Oddness: Revisiting the Curious Trophic Relationships of South American Pleistocene Mammals and Their Abundance

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe South American Pleistocene mammal fauna includes great-sized animals that have intrigued scientists for over two centuries. Here we intend to update the knowledge on its palaeoecology and provide new evidence regarding two approaches: energetics and population density and relative abundance of fossils per taxa. To determine whether an imbalance exists, population density models were applied to several South American fossil faunas and the results compared to those that best describe the palaeoecolo…