Quaternary vertebrate faunas from Sumba, Indonesia: implications for Wallacean biogeography and evolution
| Autor: | Timothy E. Jeffree, Nick Crumpton, Jennifer J. Crees, Iwan Kurniawan, Thomas Guillerme, Umbu Paranggarimu, Gerrit D. van den Bergh, Samuel T. Turvey, James P. Hansford, Erick Setiyabudi, Anthony Dosseto |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2017 |
| Předmět: |
0106 biological sciences
010506 paleontology Hominidae Fauna Biogeography 010603 evolutionary biology 01 natural sciences General Biochemistry Genetics and Molecular Biology biology.animal Animals murid Quaternary extinctions biogeography Stegodon 0105 earth and related environmental sciences General Environmental Science Islands island evolution General Immunology and Microbiology biology Ecology Fossils Australia Vertebrate General Medicine Biological evolution biology.organism_classification Biological Evolution Wallacea Palaeobiology Indonesia Vertebrates General Agricultural and Biological Sciences Quaternary Geology Research Article |
| Zdroj: | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences |
| ISSN: | 1471-2954 0962-8452 |
| Popis: | Historical patterns of diversity, biogeography and faunal turnover remain poorly understood for Wallacea, the biologically and geologically complex island region between the Asian and Australian continental shelves. A distinctive Quaternary vertebrate fauna containing the small-bodied hominin Homo floresiensis , pygmy Stegodon proboscideans, varanids and giant murids has been described from Flores, but Quaternary faunas are poorly known from most other Lesser Sunda Islands. We report the discovery of extensive new fossil vertebrate collections from Pleistocene and Holocene deposits on Sumba, a large Wallacean island situated less than 50 km south of Flores. A fossil assemblage recovered from a Pleistocene deposit at Lewapaku in the interior highlands of Sumba, which may be close to 1 million years old, contains a series of skeletal elements of a very small Stegodon referable to S. sumbaensis , a tooth attributable to Varanus komodoensis , and fragmentary remains of unidentified giant murids. Holocene cave deposits at Mahaniwa dated to approximately 2000–3500 BP yielded extensive material of two new genera of endemic large-bodied murids, as well as fossils of an extinct frugivorous varanid. This new baseline for reconstructing Wallacean faunal histories reveals that Sumba's Quaternary vertebrate fauna, although phylogenetically distinctive, was comparable in diversity and composition to the Quaternary fauna of Flores, suggesting that similar assemblages may have characterized Quaternary terrestrial ecosystems on many or all of the larger Lesser Sunda Islands. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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