Dental enamel as a dietary indicator in mammals

Lucas, Peter W.; Constantino, Paul J.; Wood, Bernard; Lawn, Brian R.

doi:10.1002/bies.20729

Cited by 281 publications

(290 citation statements)

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“…Furthermore, Lucas et al. (2008) have shown that large hard particles have the potential to fracture enamel, whereas small hard particles can only indent it. As such, independently of texture complexity, wear (defined as the loss of tooth tissue) would be greater with large particles.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeds, browse, and tooth wear: a sheep perspective

Ramdarshan

Blondel

Brunetière

et al. 2016

Ecology and Evolution

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While grazing as a selective factor towards hypsodont dentition on mammals has gained a lot of attention, the importance of fruits and seeds as fallback resources for many browsing ungulates has caught much less attention. Controlled‐food experiments, by reducing the dietary range, allow for a direct quantification of the effect of each type of items separately on enamel abrasion. We present the results of a dental microwear texture analysis on 40 ewes clustered into four different controlled diets: clover alone, and then three diets composed of clover together with either barley, corn, or chestnuts. Among the seed‐eating groups, only the barley one shows higher complexity than the seed‐free group. Canonical discriminant analysis is successful at correctly classifying the majority of clover‐ and seed‐fed ewes. Although this study focuses on diets which all fall within a single dietary category (browse), the groups show variations in dental microwear textures in relation with the presence and the type of seeds. More than a matter of seed size and hardness, a high amount of kernels ingested per day is found to be correlated with high complexity on enamel molar facets. This highlights the high variability of the physical properties of the foods falling under the browsing umbrella.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeds, browse, and tooth wear: a sheep perspective

Ramdarshan

Blondel

Brunetière

et al. 2016

Ecology and Evolution

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“…The association between environmental change and canid predatory behaviour was investigated using the arrangement of the enamel prism bands-known as bands of HunterSchreger (HSB)-as a proxy. The reason is because carnivores that live in open environments consume more intrinsic (bones from carcasses) and extrinsic (grit) hard food items, which relates to heavily folded HSB 28,51,[68][69][70] . Studies of carnivorans demonstrate a link between bone and carcass consumption and increased kleptoparasitism in open habitats because of increased carcass detectability [30][31][32] .…”

Section: U O N a Lp In U S C An Is M Es Om El As Ca Nis Ad Us Tus Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

Habitat changes and changing predatory habits in North American fossil canids

et al. 2015

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The spread of open grassy habitats and the evolution of long-legged herbivorous mammals with high-crowned cheek teeth have been viewed as an example of coevolution. Previous studies indicate that specialized predatory techniques in carnivores do not correlate with the spread of open habitats in North America. Here we analyse new data on elbow-joint shape for North American canids over the past B37 million years and show that incipiently specialized species first appeared along with the initial spread of open habitats in the late Oligocene. Elbow-joint morphologies indicative of the behavior of modern pounce-pursuit predators emerged by the late Miocene coincident with a shift in plant communities from C 3 to C 4 grasses. Finally, pursuit canids first emerged during the Pleistocene. Our results indicate that climate change and its impact on vegetation and habitat structure can be critical for the emergence of ecological innovations and can alter the direction of lineage evolution.

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“…For example, an 50 kg anthropoid is predicted to have a molar enamel volume of 6479 mm 3 , equivalent to a sphere with a 11.5 mm radius (similar to the 10 mm estimate proposed by [102] [102]. Moreover, the toughness of a food scales roughly with the amount of fiber [103]; it is reasonable to consider foods with high toughness as less digestible.…”

Section: Model Architecturementioning

confidence: 72%

“…The proximal mechanisms that cause enamel wear are not well understood [105], but likely include silica or phytoliths found within plant foods, exogenous grit or dirt on the outside of plant foods (or the inside of some insects), and/or tooth-on-tooth wear [104,102,150].…”

Section: State Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Dedication. Acknowledgments

2011

The Acquisition of German

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xvii Dedication xixAcknowledgments xx . See panel C. for a scenario where one prey is preferred over another. C. A tri-trophic system, where a top-predator consumes a meso-predator, which in turn consumes two prey. The sizes of the nodes denote relative abundance, and the thickness of the arrows denote the magnitude of the biomass flow. The top-predator in the leftmost network is relatively abundant, depressing the meso-predator population, thereby limiting the meso-predator's e↵ect on the two prey populations. The two rightmost networks (boxed) have reduced top-predator populations. In both cases, the meso-predator has greater abundance due to decreased predation pressure. However, in one scenario, both prey are preferred equally, resulting in apparent competition dynamics. In the second scenario, one prey is preferred over another, resulting in an asymmetric cascade. Such preferences could result from specific anatomical constraints of the meso-predator, a scenario explored in Chapter 4. C 1 and C 2 , and 4 prey: r 1 r 4 ) is represented by both pairwise interaction distributions for each link, and a network-level interaction distribution for the system. Link thickness represents the median link-strength, shown with the vertical bar in each pairwise interaction distribution. B-C. Both model food-webs X and Y have link-strengths drawn from the NLID. In model food-web X, the weights are distributed similar to the median weights of the empirical web (i.e. equivalent structure), but they are distributed di↵erently among nodes (i.e. alternative interactions). In model Y , the weight structure is di↵erent than that of the empirical web (i.e. alternative structure), and necessarily, the distribution of weights among nodes di↵ers as well (i.e. alternative interactions). Dotted nodes indicate those with link-strengths that di↵er from the median link-strengths of the empirical food-web. D-F. Given a single niche axis based on a continuous resource trait (e.g. body size) where prey are ranked from r 1 to r 4 , distributions of resource use are shown for the two consumers. Representations of dietary overlap illustrate higher similarity in diet between predators of the empirical system and model X, whereas the consumers in model Y have little dietary overlap, despite sharing the same NLID. 5 A-C. Sensitivity analyses of the Saskatchewan, Amboseli, and Lake Naivasha food-web ensembles, respectively. Similarity values for each cuto↵ (s i ) for Model 2 are on the y-axis, and the x-axis ranges from a lower standard deviation (SD) than the empirical SD to a higher SD (such that the empirical SD is central to the range; stippled vertical line). The colored data points represent the median similarity indices for each cuto↵ value (legend), while the top and bottom whiskers denote the 25 th and 75 th percentiles, respectively. The underlined values mark the standard deviation corresponding to the highest average similarity across cuto↵ values. For all systems, the highest average similarity is close to or exactly matches ...

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Dental enamel as a dietary indicator in mammals

Cited by 281 publications

References 77 publications

Seeds, browse, and tooth wear: a sheep perspective

Seeds, browse, and tooth wear: a sheep perspective

Habitat changes and changing predatory habits in North American fossil canids

Dedication. Acknowledgments

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