Bone Loss From Carcasses in Mediterranean Ecosystems

Sánchez, Eloísa Bernáldez; García-Viñas, Esteban; Sánchez-Donoso, Inés; Leonard, Jennifer A.

doi:10.2110/palo.2016.047

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Eloísa Bernáldez Sánchez and co-workers sampled carcasses in Doñana National Park between 1988 and 1991 with the aim of understanding the patterns that lead to carcass degradation and the influence of factors such as body size, time elapsed since death, and vegetation coverage [38,39]. They restricted their study to the Doñana Biological Reserve, a relatively small area (6,900 ha) within DNP, lacking some major habitats of the park (e.g., beach and river margin).…”

Section: Previous Taphonomic Work At Doñana National Parkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By mainly focusing on the monitoring of complete or nearly complete carcasses, their studies differed methodologically from ours (i.e., we have also analyzed many isolated bones). The main variables that they recorded were measures of skeletal disarticulation, bone dispersal, and bone loss [38,39], whereas our observations include a larger set of taphonomic variables and surveys over the full suite of DNP habitats. We consider therefore that their study and our study are not redundant but complementary.…”

Section: Previous Taphonomic Work At Doñana National Parkmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Taphonomic information from the modern vertebrate death assemblage of Doñana National Park, Spain

et al. 2020

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Modern death assemblages provide insights about the early stages of fossilization and useful ecological information about the species inhabiting the ecosystem. We present the results of taphonomic monitoring of modern vertebrate carcasses and bones from Doñana National Park, a Mediterranean coastal ecosystem in Andalusia, Spain. Ten different habitats were surveyed. Half of them occur in active depositional environments (marshland, lake margin, river margin, beach and dunes). Most of the skeletal remains belong to land mammals larger than 5 kg in body weight (mainly wild and feral ungulates). Overall, the Doñana bone assemblage shows good preservation with little damage to the bones, partly as a consequence of the low predator pressure on large vertebrates. Assemblages from active depositional habitats differ significantly from other habitats in terms of the higher incidence of breakage and chewing marks on bones in the latter, which result from scavenging, mainly by wild boar and red fox. The lake-margin and river-margin death assemblages have high concentrations of well preserved bones that are undergoing burial and offer the greatest potential to produce fossil assemblages. The spatial distribution of species in the Doñana death assemblage generally reflects the preferred habitats of the species in life. Meadows seem to be a preferred winter habitat for male deer, given the high number of shed antlers recorded there. This study is further proof that taphonomy can provide powerful insights to better understand the ecology of modern species and to infer past and future scenarios for the fossil record.

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Section: Previous Taphonomic Work At Doñana National Parkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Previous Taphonomic Work At Doñana National Parkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taphonomic information from the modern vertebrate death assemblage of Doñana National Park, Spain

et al. 2020

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“…The analysis of biostratinomic and diagenetic processes in current ecosystems is useful to understand taphocoenosis (Andrews 1995;Bernáldez-Sánchez et al 2017;Denys 2002;Domínguez-Rodrigo 1998;. There are a number of papers about the diagenesis of bones (Behrensmeyer 1978;Bernáldez-Sánchez 2011;Domínguez-Solera and Domínguez-Rodrigo 2009;Yravedra 2006), some of them related to aquatic ecosystems (Anderson and Bell 2014;Arnaud et al 1978 Fernández-Jalvo and Andrews 2003;Pokines and Higgs 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Trends in Iberian Zooarchaeology

2022

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The study of faunas from Iberian archaeological sites has been an erratic process that, starting in the mid-nineteenth century witnessed repeated periods of development and neglect. This lasted until the last decades of the 20th century when it definitively entered a prolonged trajectory of expansion in both Spain and slightly later in Portugal. The author, who started work in the 1970s, reviews some of the landmarks of these developments from his personal standpoint and, despite all the problems that still plague research on this field, feels that the best of Iberian archaeozoology is yet to come.

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“…Taphonomic pathways are multiple and diverse, comprising all of the processes that alter individual bones as well as entire archaeological and paleontological assemblages, from the time of an animal’s death to the point of analysis. Similarly, these processes can alter assemblages in diverse ways (Clark et al 1967; Brain 1983; Andrews 1990; Behrensmeyer et al 1992; Lyman 1994; Bernáldez-Sánchez 2011; Bernáldez-Sánchez et al 2017) during both formation and subsequent excavation and recovery. Cave sites may filter body size, especially if cave openings are small.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Overprinting of taphonomic and paleoecological signals across the forest–prairie environmental gradient, mid-continent of North America

Milideo

Graham

Falk³

et al. 2018

Paleobiology

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Taphonomic factors may significantly alter faunal assemblages at varying scales. An exceptional record of late Holocene (<4000 yr old) mammal faunas establishes a firm baseline to investigate the effects of scale on taphonomy. Our sample contains 73 sites within four contiguous states (North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois, USA) that transect a strong modern and late Holocene environmental gradient, the prairie–forest ecotone. We performed detrended correspondence (DCA) and non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) analyses. Both DCA and NMDS analyses of the data sets produced virtually the same results, and both failed to reveal the known ecological gradient within each state. However, both DCA and NMDS analyses of the unfiltered multistate data set across the entire gradient clearly reflect an environmental, rather than taphonomic, signal. DCA tended to provide better separation of some clusters than did NMDS in most of the analyses. We conclude that a robust mammal data set collected across a strong environmental gradient will document species turnover without the removal of taphonomic factors. In other words, taphonomy exhibits varying scale-dependent effects.

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Bone Loss From Carcasses in Mediterranean Ecosystems

Cited by 9 publications

References 27 publications

Taphonomic information from the modern vertebrate death assemblage of Doñana National Park, Spain

Taphonomic information from the modern vertebrate death assemblage of Doñana National Park, Spain

New Trends in Iberian Zooarchaeology

Overprinting of taphonomic and paleoecological signals across the forest–prairie environmental gradient, mid-continent of North America

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