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10 - Ecomorphological analysis of carnivore guilds in the Eocene through Miocene of Laurasia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2014

By
Michael Morlo ,
Gregg F. Gunnell  and
Doris Nagel
Edited by
Anjali Goswami  and
Anthony Friscia
Michael Morlo
Affiliation:
Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg, Frankfurt am Main
Gregg F. Gunnell
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
Doris Nagel
Affiliation:
Universität Wien
Anjali Goswami
Affiliation:
University College London
Anthony Friscia
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Summary

Introduction

Quantitative analyses of guild structures of living and fossil mammals have a relatively long history (e.g. Valverde, 1964; Van Valkenburgh, 1988; Legendre, 1989; Gunnell et al., 1995), although carnivores have often been excluded from older studies. However, some studies have been published dealing with general carnivore ecomorphology (e.g. Van Valkenburgh, 1992, 1999; Werdelin, 1996; Van Valkenburgh et al., 2004; Wesley-Hunt, 2005), or structures of single guilds (e.g. Dayan et al., 1989; Viranta and Andrews, 1995; Dayan and Simberloff, 1996; Jones, 2003; Hertler and Volmer, 2008). Few of these studies, however, have combined more than two parameters (e.g. body mass and diet or body mass and locomotion). In addition to body mass, diet and locomotor patterns can satisfactorily be estimated for fossil taxa (see Morlo, 1999, for an example using these three parameters in an analysis of creodont guilds). A similar methodological approach has been applied to compare several carnivore guilds (Morlo, 1999; Nagel and Morlo, 2000, 2003; Morlo and Gunnell, 2003, 2005a,b, 2006; Nagel et al., 2005; Stefen et al., 2005; Morlo and Nagel, 2007). In this chapter, we augment these studies with the addition of a set of guild analyses from the Paleocene to the Recent. Having guild structure established on the three parameters, two guilds can be tested against each other by principal component analysis (PCA) to clarify which parameters are mainly responsible for the differences.

Type
Chapter
Information
Carnivoran Evolution
New Views on Phylogeny, Form and Function
 , pp. 269 - 310
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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