Acta Zoologica Cracoviensia, 45(special issue) 2002

Issue:

VOL 45(special issue) 2002

Keywords:

Taphonomy, Tyto alba, small mammal, multirejection, prey, South Africa, France

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Owls, multirejection and completeness of prey remains: implications for small mammal taphonomy

• Frédéric LAUDET
• Christiane DENYS
• Frank SENEGAS

Abstract:

For more than twenty years, taphonomic studies have focused on bone and teeth modifications from owl prey remains due to digestion (fragmentation, dissolution by gastric juices) in order to recognize which predator(s) has (have) originated fossil bone assemblages and which bias could have occurred in terms of paleoenvironmental and archaeological interpretations. Such studies have neglected the fact that meals, particularly when large prey individuals are eaten, are sometimes spread within several pellets. This study aims to estimate the occurrence and the taphonomic consequences of prey multirejection within modern Barn Owl pellet samples recovered in the wild from France and South Africa, and establish their different diets. The taphonomic observation of the contents of each pellet has displayed patterns of completeness of prey skeleton proportionate to the size of prey per pellets. In the African owl pellets 60% of the largest rodents are represented by the postcranial parts without the skull and/or some complete limbs, or are represented by the skull only. The pattern for small prey species is less than 20%. The pellets from France include remains of small rodents and shrews, the skeletons of which rarely exhibit the pattern observed in the African pellets and are more complete, apart from 20% of them represented by only 1 to 4 elements (instead of 13% in African pellets). These bone distributions could indicate a frequent multi-rejection of prey skeletons according to the size and the number of swallowed mammals. This means that the diet and the quality of pellets recovered or preserved through time, could strongly influence the occurrence or the bone representation of some species – particularly the largest ones – within a fossil or modern pellet assemblage, with palaeoecological, ecological (by over-estimation or under-estimation of the number of species) and taphonomic implications (large variations in skeletal representation or digestion criteria). We suggest the development of such an approach in order to obtain accurate taphonomic referentials from modern pellet assemblages.