Gildas Merceron

French National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · iPHEP, UMR 7262, CNRS & Université de Poitiers

Our knowledge of the functional and taxonomic diversity of the fossil colobine fauna (Colobinae Jerdon, 1867) from the Lower Omo Valley is based only on craniodental remains. Here we describe postcranial specimens of fossil colobines from the Usno and Shungura Formations, and provide in-depth insights into their functional anatomy and taxonomy. Com...

The history and palaeoecology of the steppe bison (Bison priscus) remain incompletely understood despite its widespread distribution. Using dental microwear textural analysis (DMTA) and vegetation modelling, we reconstructed the diet and assessed the habitat of steppe bison inhabiting Eurasia and Alaska since the Middle Pleistocene. During the Late...

The climatic instability of the Early Pleistocene induced regional paleoenvironmental changes, which impacted faunal composition and dynamics. It coincides with the Homo dispersal out of Africa. The role played by the Eastern Balkans in this dispersal is at the heart of current scientific debates. The rich fossil assemblage of Gerakarou-1 (2-1.8 Ma...

During the Neogene and the Quaternary, African suids show dental morphological changes considered to reflect adaptations to increasing specialization on graminivorous diets, notably in the genus Kolpochoerus. They tend to exhibit elongated third molars and some degree of hypsodonty, suggesting increasing consumption of abrasive grasses. However, th...

Vertebrate teeth are highly mineralized dermal tissues composed, principally, of bioapatite making them highly resistant to physical and chemical alteration over geologic time scales. This means that the morphology and microstructure of fossil teeth is often preserved, providing diagnostic features for taxonomic classification and enabling inferenc...

Diagenesis has been recognized for decades to significantly alter the trace elements biogenic signatures in fossil tooth enamel and bone that are routinely used for paleobiological and paleoenvironmental reconstructions. This signature is modified during diagenesis according to a complex continuum between two main processes, addition, and substitut...

Theropithecus brumpti is a primate known from numerous craniodental specimens in the Plio-Pleistocene Shungura Formation (Lower Omo Valley, Ethiopia), but the anatomy of its hindlimb is documented only by a few associated and mostly incomplete postcranial specimens. The adaptations of T. brumpti are still debated, with its substrate preferences and...

Modern humans have populated Europe for more than 45,000 years1,2. Our knowledge of the genetic relatedness and structure of ancient hunter-gatherers is however limited, owing to the scarceness and poor molecular preservation of human remains from that period³. Here we analyse 356 ancient hunter-gatherer genomes, including new genomic data for 116...

Our knowledge of the functional and taxonomic diversity of the fossil colobine fauna (Colobinae Jerdon, 1867) from the Lower Omo Valley is based only on craniodental remains. Here we describe postcranial specimens of fossil colobines from the Usno Formation and Shungura Formation, and provide in-depth insights into their functional anatomy and taxo...

Major climatic and ecological changes are documented in terrestrial ecosystems during the Miocene epoch. The Rhinocerotidae are a very interesting clade to investigate the impact of these changes on ecology, as they are abundant and diverse in the fossil record throughout the Miocene. Here, we explored the spatio-temporal evolution of rhinocerotids...

The scale-sensitive fractal analysis (SSFA) of dental microwear textures is traditionally performed using the software Toothfrax. SSFA has been recently integrated to the software MountainsMap® as an optional module. Meanwhile, Toothfrax support has ended. Before switching to the new module, the outputs between the two software packages must be com...

The Miocene is a time of major climatic and ecological changes, documented in terrestrial ecosystems. The Rhinocerotidae are abundant and diverse in the fossil record of this epoch, making it a very interesting clade to investigate the paleoecological impact of these changes. Through dental microwear texture analyses (DMTA; short-term diet proxy) a...

The late Miocene is a period of great climatic and ecosystemic changes. The south-eastern Mediterranean region is particularly affected, with increasing aridity and habitat openness. The impact of these changes on rhinocerotids’ ecology has not been studied, although rhinoceroses were a concupious and diverse component of the Miocene mammalian asse...

Unlabelled: Discoveries in recent decades indicate that the large papionin monkeys Paradolipopithecus and Procynocephalus are key members of the Late Pliocene - Early Pleistocene mammalian faunas of Eurasia. However, their taxonomical status, phylogenetic relationships, and ecological profile remain unclear. Here we investigate the two latter aspe...

Serows and gorals (Bovidae, Caprinae) are emblematic antelopes distributed in Southeast Asia. They all are nearly threaten or vulnerable species nowadays despite having a more widespread distribution during the Pleistocene. Fossils of three native caprine species, i.e., a Sumatran serow Capricornis sumatraensis, Chinese goral Naemorhedus griseus, a...

The study examines the taxonomy of the newly excavated Nyctereutes material from Dafnero-3 (Greece) and the unpublished specimens from Varshets (Bulgaria). One cranium and a hemimandible from Dafnero-3 site are ascribed to the species Nyctereutes megamastoides, already known from Dafnero-1 and other Early Pleistocene sites of Greece. Two additional...

The late Miocene is a period of increasing aridity and habitat openness in the south-eastern Mediterranean region. The impact of these changes has not been fully explored regarding rhinocerotids’ ecology, although rhinoceroses were a major and diverse component of the Miocene mammalian faunas. Here, we investigate the palaeoecology of rhinocerotid...

Currently, very little is known about the ecology of extinct Eurasian cercopithecids. Dietary information is crucial in understanding the ecological adaptations and diversity of extinct cercopithecids and the evolution of this family. For example, the colobine genus Dolichopithecus is represented by multiple large-bodied species that inhabited Eura...

Major climatic and ecological changes are documented in terrestrial ecosystems during the Miocene epoch. The Rhinocerotidae are a very interesting clade to investigate the impact of these changes on ecology, as they are abundant and diverse in the fossil record throughout the Miocene. Here, we explored the spatio-temporal evolution of rhinocerotids...

The adaptive radiation of hipparionins after their Old World dispersal was linked with a trend towards smaller body sizes. The appearance of the small-sized forms has usually been associated to open environments and grazing diets. A recent approach, moreover, highlights the role of life history modifications related to habitat conditions as trigger...

The climatic cooling that began in the late middle Eocene and culminated in the Eocene-Oligocene transition meant major changes in Palaeotheriidae (Perissodactyla, Mammalia) biodiversity in Europe and could have caused the appearance of new dietary strategies. This work is the first to study the spatiotemporal response of one palaeotheriid genus (P...

In order to understand mammalian evolution and compute a wide range of biodiversity indices, we commonly use the ‘bioregion’, a spatial division adapted to ecological and evolutionary constraints. While commonly conducted by neontologists, the establishment of bioregions in palaeontology is generally a secondary analysis, shaped on subjective time...

Dietary habits exert significant selective pressures on anatomical structures in animals, leading to substantial morphological adaptations. Yet, the relationships between the mandible and diet are still unclear, raising issues for paleodietary reconstructions notably. To assess the impact of food hardness and size on morphological structures, we us...

Material properties of the diet of extant species is reflected by the microwear texture recorded on the enamel tooth surface, a signal that can be useful for estimating the diets of extinct species. Intra-specific dietary variations can occur between sexes or depend on seasonal vegetation cover changes in their habitat. However, these factors canno...

Years of studies have already highlighted the complex combination, in moose feeding ecology, of a marked selectivity coupled with a significant dietary adaptability toward changes in the local resource availability. Dental textures resulting from masticatory movements and the properties of ingested food items constitute a link between the animal, i...

The Shungura Formation (Lower Omo Valley, Ethiopia) constitutes one of the most complete stratigraphic and paleontological records for the Plio-Pleistocene of eastern Africa and has yielded a large collection of fossil bovids, in which the most abundant tribe is Reduncini (waterbucks, kobs, and relatives). We used a multi-proxy approach to precisel...

The late early Miocene Béon 1 locality has yielded an abundant vertebrate fauna with more than 5,000 remains assigned to four rhinocerotid species: the stem rhinocerotine Plesiaceratherium mirallesi, the teleoceratines Prosantorhinus douvillei and Brachypotherium brachypus, and the early-diverging elasmotheriine Hispanotherium beonense. Such a prof...

Milk production and excretion may drive sex specific differences in body calcium (Ca) isotope composition, as evidenced by sheep bones collected within a single herd [1]. Such differences between sexes are however not observed in human populations [2], raising questions about Ca isotope fractionation mechanisms in mammals. We investigated this issu...

This study aims at improving dietary discrimination among primates through a new analytic approach of dental microwear texture analysis integrating a surface sampling on facets of both phase I and II of mastication. The surface sampling is applied on these two types of molar facets on 104 specimens belonging to four extant cercopithecids, and on 20...

Extant colobine monkeys are specialized leaf eaters. But during the late Miocene, western Eurasia was home to colobines which were less efficient at chewing leaves than they were at breaking seed shells. To understand the link between folivory and granivory in this lineage, the dietary niche of Mesopithecus delsoni and M. pentelicus was investigate...

The thick-enameled, bunodont dentition shared by most early hominins has traditionally been interpreted as reflecting durophagy, especially in the robust genus Paranthropus. However, subsequent works on dental microwear textures (DMT) and biogeochemical compositions have challenged this hypothesis. Some authors argued that their robust morphology m...

There are clues that calcium (Ca) isotope composition of vertebrate bioapatite is influenced by diet and trophic level. These clues however conflict with several cases of mammal species exhibiting Ca isotope compositions which are inconsistent with their trophic levels. These observations support that diet may not be the only factor driving the Ca...

Paleobiologists tend to use dietary information as an ecological indicator because diet is a fundamental link between an organism and its environment. However, the ecological information from fossilized hard tissues is often difficult to interpret, because links between environment, diet, and hard tissue biology are insufficiently studied in modern...

This paper aims to contribute to the stratigraphic and geochronological evaluation of the primate bearing Dafnero fossil site of Northern Greece by means of lithostratigraphic, paleomagnetic and paleontological analyses. The 60 m thick fossiliferous deposits of fluviatile origin are recognized as representing a typical braided-river sequence unconf...

A new sample of 65 specimens representing a minimum number of 15 individuals of the Eurasian antelope Gazellospira torticornis is described from the Lower Pleistocene fossil sites of Dafnero (DFN, N. Greece). The intrapopulation comparisons highlight that several cranial (frontal sinuses, inter-frontal sutures, longitudinal grooves, degree of the h...

This document presents the code, data and analysis used in the paper ‘From leaves to seeds: The dietary shift in late Miocene colobine monkeys of southeastern Europe’ co-authored by Ghislain THIERY, Corentin GIBERT, Franck GUY, Vincent LAZZARI, Nikolaï SPASSOV, Denis GERAADS and Gildas MERCERON. Its objective was to investigate the origins of the e...

In Pincevent (Paris Basin), archeaozoologists have observed a variation of hunting strategies between Magdalenian levels IV0 and IV20. Previous works on human‐prey interaction showed that hunters modeled their behavior on their prey; therefore, reconstructing animal behavior in order to reconstruct human strategies could enable better interpretatio...

The homotheres, although known from the Greek fossil record since the beginning of the 1930’s, have only been recorded from fragmentary material, sometimes undescribed and with questionable determinations. In 2017, the discovery of an almost complete cranium and a fairly complete humerus of a machairodontine in Dafnero-3, a lower Pleistocene site f...

We here report on fossil remains of the earliest known crown-Testudo, an extant clade of Mediterranean testudinid tortoises from the late Miocene (Vallesian, MN 10) from the hominoid locality Ravin de la Pluie (RPl) in Greece. The material studied is a small, nearly complete carapace with a clearly distinct hypo-xiphiplastral hinge. This supports t...

The Serra do Mar Atlantic forest (Brazil) shelters about 15 different species of caviomorph rodents and thus represents a unique opportunity to explore resource partitioning. We studied 12 species with distinct diets using dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA). Our results revealed differences (complexity, textural fill volume, and heterogeneity...

Poster for the PhD Students' Day at the Institut des Sicences de l'Evolution de Montpellier (ISE-M). During amelogenesis (enamel formation) stops may occur and lead to the formation of defects when a certain threshold is met (Figure 1; Goodman and Rose, 1990). One of these defects, hypoplasia, is quantitative, non- specific, and permanent. Hypopl...

Rhinoceroses were conspicuous elements in Cenozoic ecosystems, and studying the ecological behavior of extant species might unravel the ecology of their fossil kin. Microwear as a short-term recorder may detect subtle variations in the diet. Dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA) is extensively used to infer paleodiets. Yet, regarding ungulates,...

With about 250 fossil species, rhinoceroses were conspicuous elements in Cenozoic ecosystems and studying the ecological behavior of the five extant species might unravel the ecology of their fossil kin, through uniformitarianism. Dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA) – a short-term recorder of dental abrasion – is extensively used to infer pale...

Antelope remains are abundant in the African fossil record, and have previously been used in paleoenvironmental reconstructions. Antelope species are widespread along the grazer-browser dietary spectrum, and can therefore provide information on local paleoenvironments by evaluating which species are present, and which dietary categories are most re...

A new study by Fraser et al (2018) urges the use of phylogenetic comparative methods, whenever possible, in analyses of mammalian tooth wear. We are concerned about this for two reasons. First, this recommendation may mislead the research community into thinking that phylogenetic signal is an artifact of some sort rather than a fundamental outcome...

This study aims to explore the feeding ecology of two terrestrial papionins, Papio and Theropithecus from the Shungura Formation in Ethiopia, the most complete stratigraphic and paleontological record of the African Plio-Pleistocene. Two aspects were evaluated using Dental Microwear Texture Analysis: differences in diet between the extinct genera a...

Modern surface acquisition devices, such as interferometers and confocal microscopes, make it possible to have accurate three-dimensional (3D) numerical representations of real surfaces. The numerical dental surfaces hold details that are related to the microwear that is caused by food processing. As there are numerous surface parameters that descr...

The Plio-Pleistocene fossil record of African suids documents repeated convergent instances of progressive changes in third molar morphologies (increases in crown length and height). Based on uniformitarianism, those changes were classically interpreted as adaptive responses to herbivory in more and more open landscapes resulting from global climat...

Modern caviomorphs or South American hystricognathous rodents exhibit a great taxonomical and ecological diversity,with a broad spectrum of dietary habits, ranging from frugivorous to grass eaters. Their oldest record dates back to the late middle Eocene from Peruvian Amazonia. Continuous paleontological field efforts have substantially increased t...

Environmental changes related to forest expansion and later to agricultural development and deforestation during the Holocene in Europe have strongly shaped herbivore distribution and habitat selection, leading to species extinction. In this paper, we examine, through dental microwear textural analysis, the foraging habitats, dietary flexibility an...

A new fossil cranium of a large papionin monkey from the Lower Pleistocene site of Dafnero-3 in Western Macedonia, Greece, is described by means of outer and inner morphological and metric traits using high-resolution micro-computed tomography. Comparisons with modern cercopithecids and contemporaneous Eurasian fossil taxa suggest that the new cran...

Today, the family Giraffidae is restricted to two genera endemic to the African continent, Okapia and Giraffa, but, with over ten genera and dozens of species, it was far more diverse in the Old World during the late Miocene. We attempt to describe here how several species may have shared feeding resources in the Eastern Mediterranean. Dietary pref...

Les mammifères ont conquis tous les milieux et sont capables de courir, escalader, creuser, nager et même voler. Les mammifères cénozoïques propose une plongée dans l’évolution des mammifères pour comprendre les origines de leur succès. Les étonnantes adaptations des mammifères actuels et l’histoire de leurs ancêtres révèlent le lien étroit qui exi...

The reconstruction of past vegetation and climatic conditions of the Cradle of Humankind, Gauteng Province, South Africa, has been approached using various proxies (such as micromammals, speleothems, faunal and floral presence and stable carbon isotopes). Elisabeth Vrba's seminal studies (1974; 1975) on the fossil record of this region indicated dr...

Camels are exceptionally rare in the Plio-Pleistocene fossil record of Africa, hindering attempts to understand the evolution of this family on the continent. Here we describe recently collected camel specimens from the Shungura Formation, Lower Omo Valley, Ethiopia, and attribute these remains to Camelus grattardi. The new specimens date to the la...

Percher AM, Merceron G, Nsi Akoue G, Galbany J, Romero A, Charpentier MJ. Dental microwear textural analysis as an analytical tool to depict individual traits and reconstruct the diet of a primate. Am J Phys Anthropol. 2017;00:1–16. Objectives: Dental microwear is a promising tool to reconstruct animals' diet because it reflects the interplay bet...

A new fossil cranium of a large papionin monkey from the Lower Pleistocene site of Dafnero-3 in Western Macedonia, Greece, is described by means of outer and inner morphological and metric traits using high-resolution micro-computed tomography. Comparisons with modern cercopithecids and contemporaneous Eurasian fossil taxa suggest that the new cran...

Here, we present a short review of the most recent results that have come out of the TRIDENT project. This project aims to model tooth wear by performing controlled food testing on sheep. This approach offers us the opportunity to test various scientific questions which colleagues, working exclusively on fossil and modern wild species, have been un...

Tooth wear and, more specifically, dental microwear texture is a dietary proxy that has been used for years in vertebrate paleoecology and ecology. DMTA, dental microwear texture analysis, relies on a few parameters related to the surface complexity, anisotropy and heterogeneity of the enamel facets at the micrometric scale. Working with few but ph...

Extant colobine monkeys have been historically described as specialized folivores. However, reports on both their behavior and dental metrics tend to ascribe a more varied diet to them. In particular, several species, such as Pygathrix nemaeus and Rhinopithecus roxellana, are dedicated seasonal seed eaters. They use the lophs on their postcanine te...

The early Pleistocene is represented by a succession of glacial–interglacial cycles characterized by a general tendency towards global cooling, with increasing aridity and seasonality. The large deer Eucladoceros is found in abundance in Europe during this period of faunal dispersions. The dietary plasticity of Eucladoceros and how it can mirror ea...