Acta Zoologica Cracoviensia, 38(1) 1995

Issue:

VOL 38(1) 1995

Keywords:

Ecosystem, palaeoecology, taxonomy, adaptation, size, multivariate analysis, species diversity, ecological diversity

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Mammals as palaeoecological indicators

• Peter ANDREWS

Abstract:

The study of palaeoecology aims to reconstruct past ecologies with a view to understanding evolutionary and biogeographic change. There are many sources of information leading to palaeoecological reconstructions, but in this paper I will be concerned with the use of mammals as palaeoecological indicators. Methods of varying complexity can be used to interpret palaeoecology from the evidence of mammalian faunas. There is no right way or wrong way to do this, only the most appropriate for the particular case, whether it be complex or simple. Most methods rely on the comparative method, i.e. comparisons of past faunas with those living today. Taxonomic comparisons are the most common in palaeontology, with inferences on palaeoecology being made on the basis of relationships of fossil with living taxa. There is growing emphasis also on morphological comparisons, whereby functional morphologies of fossil animals can be interpreted by reference to those of living animals, with the ecological consequences of the morphologies inferred from these. Total species diversity of fossil faunas can also provide limited ecological information, and the diversity may also be analysed by single ecological parameters such as size distributions of faunas. Finally, ecological diversities may be analysed by univariate statistics or combined in multivariate functions to provide more complete information on the structure of whole communities, and these analyses may also be manipulated by rarefaction to simulate particular taphonomic biases in fossil faunas or to attempt to reconstruct past communities that have no living counterpart today.