Common mammals drive the evolutionary increase of hypsodonty in the Neogene
Common mammals drive the evolutionary increase of hypsodonty in the Neogene
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DOI：
10.1038/417538a
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发表时间：
2002-05-30
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Fortelius, M
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Jernvall, J;Fortelius, M
在过去的2000万年里，许多血统的食草性哺乳动物进化出了长着高冠的面颊牙齿。下齿在生态学上是有意义的，因为它在食用纤维和研磨性食物的哺乳动物中发育良好，而这些食物在开阔和通常或季节性干燥的环境中最为丰富(1-5)。在这里，我们报告说，在欧洲的新近纪，具有最大局部覆盖率的哺乳动物表现出下沉行为的增加。我们使用了209个地点的数据集来衡量在许多化石地点出现的大型哺乳动物是否表现出与单一或少数地点出现的哺乳动物类似的下沉增加。分类学和形态分类表明，早中新世处于较低的平均水平。从中新世中期开始，只有常见的哺乳动物的下身能力明显增加。因此，在中新世晚期干旱的欧洲，只有越来越多的短角类哺乳动物才能扩大它们的栖息地和食物资源的份额。这些结果表明，从多个地点已知的相对较少的物种本身就具有古生态信息，而与其余已知物种无关。
During the past 20 million years, herbivorous mammals of numerous lineages have evolved hypsodont, or high-crowned, cheek teeth. Hypsodonty is informative ecologically because it is well developed in mammals eating fibrous and abrasive foods that are most abundant in open and generally or seasonally dry environments(1-5). Here we report that in the Neogene of Europe mammals with the greatest locality coverages showed an increase in hypsodonty. We used a data set of 209 localities to measure whether large mammals occurring in many fossil localities show a similar increase in hypsodonty to mammals occurring in single or few localities. Taxonomic and morphological groupings show a low average hypsodonty in the early Miocene epoch. From the middle Miocene onwards, only the hypsodonty of commonly found mammals shows a marked increase. Therefore, in the drying Europe of the late Miocene, only increasingly hypsodont mammals may have been able to expand their share of habitats and food resources. These results suggest that the relatively small number of species known from multiple localities are palaeoecologically informative by themselves, irrespective of the rest of the known species.