Corentin Bochaton- PhD
- Chargé de Recherche at French National Centre for Scientific Research
Corentin Bochaton
- PhD
- Chargé de Recherche at French National Centre for Scientific Research
Permanent researcher at the Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier (ISEM)
About
68
Publications
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Introduction
My research is focused on past reptiles and amphibians with a special interest in the interactions of these animals with past human populations in tropical areas. I’m also interested in the study of past, present, and future impact of human populations on their environment using paleoecological data as a proxy. My research is at the crossroad of Paleontology, Zooarchaeology, and Evolutionary Sciences.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
January 2020 - January 2021
January 2018 - January 2020
October 2013 - October 2016
Education
September 2011 - June 2013
September 2008 - June 2011
Publications
Publications (68)
Fossil remains provide useful insights into the long-term impact of anthropogenic
phenomena on faunas and are often used to reveal the local
(extirpations) or global (extinctions) losses of populations or species. However,
other phenomena such as minor morphological changes can remain inconspicuous
in the fossil record depending on the methodology...
The identification at species level of subfossil remains of lizards from tropical regions currently suffers from
strong limitation linked to the lack of comprehensive work conducted on the osteology of modern taxa. The aim of this
study is to provide osteological criteria allowing for the specific identification of the subfossil remains of Sundalan...
Evidence for chronological change in intra-site subsistence strategies is very rare in the Amerindian record of the Lesser Antilles. The study of the vertebrate assemblage from the archeological site of Roseau in the Guadeloupe Islands underlines the complexity and variability of Ceramic Age Amerindian subsistence behavior. This study establishes a...
Large-scale extinction is one of the defining challenges of our time, as human processes fundamentally and irreversibly reshape global ecosystems. While the extinction of large animals with popular appeal garners widespread public and research interest, the importance of smaller, less “charismatic” species to ecosystem health is increasingly recogn...
Although the importance of the archaeological record for addressing questions of biodiversity is gaining ground, its relevance for describing past faunal communities is still
under-exploited, particularly for the most under-documented areas and species. Among the most poorly documented taxa are reptiles and amphibians, which are rarely studied in d...
The study of past faunal assemblages and of their evolution during the last millennia can enable us to describe the long-term modification of the fauna and to understand how, when, and why, it evolved. In Southeast Asia, such studies are rare which makes complex the understanding of the trajectories of the Human/Biodiversity interactions on the mid...
Although the Hoabinhian culture is renowned for its unifacial pebble tools and its discovery dates back more than a century, only a handful of sites provide complete information on this period. The site of Laang Spean, in Cambodia, has recently been described as a burial cave for the Neolithic period, but it was previously known as an emblematic Ho...
With the global pandemic of Covid-19, the putative threats related to the increasing contact between wild animals, including bats, and human populations have been highlighted. Bats are indeed known to carry several zoonoses, but at the same time, many species are currently facing the risk of extinction. In this context, being able to monitor the ev...
Taphonomic analyses are of primary importance to understand the accumulation processes of fossil vertebrate bone assemblages. These approaches are fundamental in archaeological contexts in which the role of humans in the formation of an accumulation must be investigated in detail. However, taphonomic works have so far focused on temperate regions a...
Although non-marine turtles are nearly ubiquitous in the Southeast Asian archaeological record, their zooarchaeological study has been very poorly undertaken in that tropical region of the world. This lack of study makes the understanding of past human subsistence strategies very complex especially regarding the prehistoric hunter gatherer populati...
Summary-Taxonomic list of the herpetofauna in the Overseas France: VI Department of La Réunion. We present an updated taxonomic checklist of the Amphibians and "Reptiles" of the French department of Reunion Island located in the Mascarene archipelago, southwestern Indian Ocean. We synthesized information from the most recent publications. In additi...
Paleo- and neo-taphonomic analyses of bone assemblages rarely consider all the occurring taxa in a single study and works concerning birds of prey as accumulators of microvertebrate bone remains mostly focus on small mammals such as rodents and soricomorphs. However, raptors often hunt and consume a large range of taxa, including vertebrates such a...
La liste taxinomique est actualisée pour les Amphibiens et les « Reptiles » de la Guadeloupe, département et région d' outre-mer dans les Petites Antilles. Elle tient compte des publications les plus récentes. À côté du nom scientifique zoologique international, nous attribuons un nom scientifique français à chaque taxon.
Summary: Taxonomic list of...
The important role of snakes in the past symbolic and subsistence behaviors of humans in tropical areas is well known. However, although the long-term impact of humans on biodiversity no longer needs to be demonstrated, understanding of its potential influence on snake biodiversity is still lacking. The morphological complexity of their vertebrae,...
Documenting recent extinction events against the backdrop of increasing human-induced environmental pressure is complicated by the lack of historical and subfossil evidence for most parts of the world. This paucity of data renders it particularly difficult to evaluate the human impact on fragile environments, such as small islands, that may have be...
Although there is an increasing amount of subfossil data available that documents the effects of past human impact on the biodiversity of the West Indies, many islands remain poorly documented, if at all. The palaeontological study of an assemblage of terrestrial mollusc shells and bone remains recovered on the surface level of two cave deposits, T...
Le laboratoire PACEA (CNRS-Université de Bordeaux-MCC) conduit depuis une dizaine d’années des recherches dédiées à la caractérisation des communautés animales terrestres passées des îles de Guadeloupe, leur évolution dans le temps (disparition/introduction, extinction, réduction vs accroissement d’aire de distribution) et les moteurs des modificat...
La liste taxinomique est établie pour les Serpents des Petites Antilles. Elle tient compte des publications les plus récentes. A côté du nom scientifique zoologique, un nom scientifique français est joint à chaque taxon. La présence passée des Boa et des Clelia dans les Petites Antilles est clarifiée et discutée. Il n'y a pas eu de Bothrops dans le...
The past distribution of Boa snakes and their interactions with Pre-Columbian human populations in the Lesser Antilles (Caribbean) remain enigmatic. These snakes currently have a patchy distribution in the islands and are nearly absent from archaeological deposits. This raises questions about whether their absence from Pre-Columbian contexts should...
Several Late Pleistocene and Holocene South-East Asian subfossil deposits are known to contain important osteological assemblages of Monitor lizards (Varanus sp.) possibly accumulated by past human populations. Indeed, thanks to their large sizes, Monitor lizards are supposed to have been an important source of meat intake for past hunter-gatherer...
ABSTRACT
Snakes of the family Dipsadidae Bonaparte, 1838 still occur on most of the Lesser Antillean islands, although they have been strongly impacted by modern and historical anthropogenic disturbances as it has been demonstrated for many squamate taxa worldwide. However, these observations mostly rely on modern assemblages, whereas the fossil re...
With more than 50 extant turtle species, Southeast Asia is currently a hotspot of turtle biodiversity. However, the distribution areas of most species are decreasing as a consequence of human activities. The causes of this decline are multiple: habitat and natural resources destruction, introduction of invasive species, hunting, etc. Historical dat...
La liste taxinomique de référence est établie pour les Amphibiens et les Sauropsides non aviens (= « Reptiles ») de la Martinique, collectivité territoriale d'outre-mer dans les Petites Antilles. Elle tient compte des publications les plus récentes. À côté du nom scientifique zoologique, un nom scientifique français est joint à chaque taxon. La pré...
Since the initial description of the complex Ailuropoda-Stegodon as a faunal association with biochronological significance for the Southeast Asian area, few sites have provided paleontological data allowing for an extensive documentation of past fauna. Biodiversity and paleo-environmental reconstructions of Pleistocene fauna are still generally ba...
La grotte des Bambous est située sur le littoral oriental de la Grande Terre, à 5 km à l’ouest de la commune du Moule. Elle se trouve à quelques centaines de mètres du rivage, dans une ravine prenant naissance sur le plateau de Sainte-Marguerite et se jetant dans l’Anse Patate. Résultant d’une karstification phréatique du calcaire, cette cavité s’o...
Squamate remains from fossil-bearing deposits are difficult to identify on the basis of their morphology, because their modern relatives lack osteological description. In addition, intraspecific morphological variability of modern taxa is mostly understudied, making taxonomic identification of subfossil bones even more difficult. The aim of this st...
Marie-Galante Island (Guadeloupe, French West-Indies) has recently been the object of several paleontological investigations in order to characterize the evolution of its terrestrial vertebrate paleobiodiversity during the last 40 000 years. This paper consists in a synthesis these recently obtained results obtained by crossed studies of several la...
La liste taxinomique de référence est établie pour les Amphibiens et les Sauropsides non aviens de la collectivité d'outre-mer français de Saint-Barthélemy, dans les Petites Antilles. Elle tient compte des publications les plus récentes. À côté du nom scientifique zoologique, un nom scientifique français est joint à chaque taxon. Une mise au point...
Summary – Taxonomic list of the herpetofauna in the overseas territories of France: II. Collectivity of Saint Barthélemy. The taxonomic checklist is established for the Amphibians and non-avian Sauropsids of the French Collectivity of Saint Barthélemy, in the Lesser Antilles. It takes into account of the most recent publications. In addition to zoo...
Several studies have reported the occurrence of fossil remains of a now extinct Boa snake from the upper
Pleistocene of Marie-Galante Island, French West Indies. However, these remains have never been fully investigated and no
complete description of this possible new species has been published. In this paper, we try to bridge this gap by providing...
The identification of domestic equid remains is a recurrent issue and an intense subject of discussion in zooarchaeological studies. Indeed, despite historical sources describing the key role of equids in numerous past societies, their accurate identification on archaeological sites is still problematic, and only few methods have been developed in...
In this paper we present a natural deposit in Marie-Galante island (French West Indies), Blanchard 2, where historical-period Audubon's shearwater remains dominate the vertebrate assemblage. We combined a study of sediment geometry, a taphonomic analysis of molluscs, crustaceans and vertebrate remains, and direct radiocarbon dating on bird bone to...
This paper aims to demonstrate how subfossil bone remains from Pleistocene and Holocene deposits can help to reconstruct the history of recently extinct taxa through the example of Pholidoscelis lizards from the Guadeloupe Islands in the French West Indies. To achieve this, we conducted a new anatomical and zooarchaeological study of fossil Pholido...
La recherche concernant l’impact de l’Homme sur la biodiversité animale et végétale du passé est développée de longue date par des équipes de recherche françaises et internationales. Ces travaux concernent, pour la plupart, la mise en évidence de phénomènes anthropogènes d’invasions, d’extinctions ou d’érosion de la diversité morphologique et génét...
Estimating the size of fossil organisms is essential for most paleontological studies, including studies of fossil squamates. Paradoxically, few works about the methods used to achieve this goal have been published. This study focuses on two genera of lizards found in the Lesser Antilles: Pholidoscelis and Anolis. We produced sets of size estimatio...
Stoetzel E., Fraysse A., Grouard S., Bochaton C., Gala M., Lenoble A. & Denys C.
This study presents new information on the diet of Tyto insularis in Dominica, Lesser Antilles. The
study of 57 pellets and bulk material collected in 1999 (23) and 2000 (34) contained 517 prey items of relatively high diversity. These included squamates (2 species),...
Today, Diploglossine lizards (Anguidae) are common on the Greater Antillean Islands (West Indies), where they are represented by many endemic species. However these lizards are very rare on the Lesser Antillean Islands, where they are only represented by a single species, the Montserrat galliwasp (Diploglossus montisserrati). Here, we show that dip...
The goal of this study was to provide tools to estimate size and maturity of the archaeological Iguana specimens on the basis of their skeletal remains. To achieve this, a reference of 40 Iguana osteological specimens from different collections was used to derive size prediction equations relying on bone measurements. The sequence of fusions of ske...
Le site de la Grotte Blanchard récemment fouillé sur l’île de Marie-Galante permet de décrire l’évolution des
communautés de vertébrés de l’île depuis les 40 derniers millénaires. Il en ressort un fort renouvellement de
la biocénose entre le Pléistocène supérieur et l’actuel, illustré par des taux d’extinction variant entre 30%
et 70% selon le g...
Reporting the diet of recently extinct or very rare taxa, only known by a few museum specimens, is challenging. This study uses X-ray microtomography, a non-destructive investigation method, to obtain the first data about feeding behaviours in the Montserrat galliwasp (Diploglossus montisserrati) by scanning one of the two specimens known to date....
Pit cave 6 on Pointe Gros Rempart (Baie-Mahault, La Désirade, French West Indies) is a stratified fossil-bearing site. While the archaeological material and faunal remains from the oldest assemblage demonstrate it to have formed during the Amerindian period, the second assemblage dates to the first one-hundred years of the island's colonial period...
This paper provides precise dates for the voluntary introduction of the hylid frog Litoria aurea in New Caledonia and Wallis Island (Wallis and Futuna) in Oceania. Data are based on published records and on specimens from MNHN-RA (Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris) collection registers.
Although diploglossine osteoderms were mentioned in several systematic and paleontological studies, their morphological variability in single specimens or within species remains paradoxically undescribed. This is mainly the effect of the lack of attention paid hitherto to the morphological and histological characteristics of the tail osteoderms. Th...
This study deals with the herpetofaunal fossil and subfossil remains from the Cadet 2 site (Marie-Galante, Guadeloupean Archipelago). This study provides new data concerning the herpetofaunal community since the Late Pleistocene by revealing the early local occurrence of some taxa (Eleutherodactylus sp., cf. Sphaerodactylus sp., Ameiva sp., cf. Cap...
The origins of the two iguana species (Iguana delicatissima [Lesser Antillean Iguana] and Iguana iguana [Green Iguana]) occurring today in the Lesser Antilles are frequently questioned using mostly historical and genetic data. Osteological remains of iguanas are common in archaeological and paleontological deposits in the Lesser Antilles, however,...
Les paramètres agissant sur la dynamique des communautés animales (mammifères, squamates, amphibiens, oiseaux) en Guadeloupe, perçue par le biais de la composition taxinomique des taphocénoses, sont discutés sur la base dune approche éco-systémique.
Here we report the predation on a colony of Lesser naked-backed bat (Pteronotus davyi) by a pair of American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) based on observations over a 16 day period. Kestrels preyed on bats in the evening as they were leaving their roost with two factors controlling hunting efficiency, namely: (1) meteorological conditions, and (2) th...
