Can habitat and elevation explain mid-Miocene Neotropical mammal provinciality?

栖息地和海拔可以解释中新世中期新热带哺乳动物的省域性吗？

• 批准号: 1423058
• 负责人: Darin Croft
• 金额: $ 23.39万
• 依托单位: Case Western Reserve University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-01-01 至 2018-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1423058&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: habitat; elevation; explain; mid; Miocene

Non-technical Abstract:Why do so many species live in the tropics? This question can only be answered by uncovering the factors that have affected species diversity over geologic time. A better conceptual understanding of these factors will enable government and conservation organizations to make more informed decisions about how to preserve modern tropical biodiversity. The project will contribute to this effort by generating a detailed picture of the climate and habitats of a 13 million-year-old fossil site in Bolivia known as Quebrada Honda. In addition to producing new scientific insights, the project will have a variety of broader impacts including: increasing participation of Bolivian students and faculty in the sciences; supporting career development of a female PhD candidate; and enhancing Cleveland research infrastructure through new collaborations. Results of the proposed research will be disseminated through a variety of media in English and Spanish including a multimedia exhibit module in the permanent exhibits of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and an accompanying mobile app on how scientists interpret past climates and habitats.Technical Abstract:Few well-sampled fossil mammal sites are known from the South American tropics. Two of these sites are contemporaneous (late middle Miocene) and widely separated geographically and thus present a unique opportunity to test hypotheses about the de-velopment of South American geographic provinciality. One of these sites, La Venta, Colombia, has been studied in detail. The other site, Quebrada Honda, Bolivia, will be the focus of our fieldwork-intensive project, which will generate new data about deposi-tional environments and habitats of using a variety of geological and paleontological techniques. The main objectives include: (1) stratigraphically correlating the main fossil-producing areas at Quebrada Honda with one another to determine the manner and rate by which fossils accumulated; (2) undertaking detailed studies of ancient soils and trace fossils to reconstruct ancient land surfaces and document past environments; and (3) using ecological characteristics of mammals to deduce the habitats in which they lived. These data will produce a comprehensive picture of the ancient climate and habitats of Quebrada Honda and will be compared to data from La Venta to test whether the great differences in the mammal faunas of these two sites can be explained by differences in paleoenvironment. The observations will also be used test the recent clumped isotope-based assertion that the elevation of Quebrada Honda was more than 2 km when the fossils were deposited.

非技术摘要：为什么这么多物种生活在热带？这个问题只能通过揭示地质时期影响物种多样性的因素来回答。对这些因素有更好的概念性理解将使政府和保护组织能够就如何保护现代热带生物多样性做出更明智的决定。该项目将对这一努力作出贡献，详细描绘玻利维亚一个名为Quebrada本田的有1 300万年历史的化石遗址的气候和生境。除了产生新的科学见解外，该项目还将产生各种更广泛的影响，包括：增加玻利维亚学生和教师对科学的参与;支持女博士候选人的职业发展;通过新的合作加强克利夫兰的研究基础设施。拟议的研究结果将通过英语和西班牙语的各种媒体进行传播，包括克利夫兰自然历史博物馆永久展品中的多媒体展览模块和随附的移动的应用程序，科学家如何解释过去的气候和栖息地。技术摘要：南美热带地区很少有采样良好的哺乳动物化石遗址。其中两个地点是同时代的（中中新世晚期），在地理上相距甚远，因此提供了一个独特的机会来检验关于南美洲地理区域性的发展的假设。对其中一个地点哥伦比亚的拉文塔进行了详细研究。另一个地点是玻利维亚的Quebrada本田，将是我们实地工作密集型项目的重点，该项目将使用各种地质和古生物技术生成关于沉积环境和栖息地的新数据。主要目标包括：（1）将克夫拉达本田的主要化石产地进行地层对比，以确定化石积累的方式和速度;（2）对古代土壤和遗迹化石进行详细研究，以重建古代陆地表面并记录过去的环境;（3）利用哺乳动物的生态特征推断它们生活的栖息地。这些数据将全面反映Quebrada本田的古代气候和生境，并将与拉文塔的数据进行比较，以检验这两个地点哺乳动物区系的巨大差异是否可以用古环境的差异来解释。这些观测结果也将用于检验最近基于成团同位素的断言，即当化石沉积时，Quebrada本田的海拔超过2公里。