
Quentin MartinezState Museum of Natural History Stuttgart | SMNS · Department of Paleontology
Quentin Martinez
I am interested in the evolution of olfaction in vertebrates.
About
28
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
May 2021 - August 2023
January 2018 - April 2021
Publications
Publications (28)
Shrews are among the most speciose of mammalian clades, but their evolutionary history is poorly understood. Their fossil record is fragmentary and even the anatomy of living groups is not well documented. Here, we incorporate the oldest, most complete fossil shrew yet known into the first phylogenetic analysis of the group to include molecular, mo...
The length of the snout in mammals has important evolutionary consequences for the functional systems housed within the rostrum. However, whether increased snout lengths lead to expanded olfactory performance has rarely been examined. Here, we investigate inner rostral function among 10 species of myrmecophagous (ant‐ and/or termite‐eating) placent...
The early diversification of tetrapods into terrestrial environments involved adaptations of their locomotor apparatus that allowed for weight support and propulsion on heterogeneous surfaces. Many lineages subsequently returned to the water, while others conquered the aerial environment, further diversifying under the physical constraints of locom...
Turbinals are key bony elements of the mammalian nasal cavity, involved in heat and moisture conservation as well as olfaction. While turbinals are well known in some groups, their diversity is poorly understood at the scale of placental mammals, which span 21 orders. Here, we investigated the turbinal bones and associated lamellae for one represen...
Turbinals are bony or cartilaginous structures that are present in the nasal cavity of most tetrapods. They are involved in key functions such as olfaction, heat, and moisture conservation, as well as protection of the respiratory tract. Despite recent studies that challenged long‐standing hypotheses about their physiological and genomic correlatio...
The number of functional genes coding for olfactory receptors differs markedly between species and has repeatedly been suggested to be predictive of a species’ olfactory capabilities. To test this assumption, we compiled a database of all published olfactory detection threshold values in mammals and used three sets of data on olfactory discriminati...
The evolution of endothermy in vertebrates is a major research topic in recent decades that has been tackled by a myriad of research disciplines including paleontology, anatomy, physiology, evolutionary and developmental biology. The ability of most mammals to maintain a relatively constant and high body temperature is considered a key adaptation,...
Turbinals are bony or cartilaginous structures that are present in the nasal cavity of most tetrapods. They are involved in key functions such as olfaction, heat, and moisture conservation, as well as protection of the respiratory tract. Despite recent studies that challenged long standing hypotheses about their physiological and genomics correlati...
Linking genes to phenotypes has been a major question in evolutionary biology for the last decades. In the genomic era, few studies attempted to link olfactory-related genes to different anatomical proxies. However, they found very inconsistent results. This study is the first to investigate a potential relation between olfactory turbinals and olfa...
Acquiring a subterranean lifestyle entails a substantial shift for many aspects of terrestrial vertebrates’ biology. Although this lifestyle is associated with multiple instances of convergent evolution, the relative success of some subterranean lineages largely remains unexplained. Here, we focus on the mammalian transitions to life underground, q...
The phylogenetic relationships of major groups within the Order Eulipotyphla was once highly disputed, but the advent of molecular studies has greatly improved our understanding about the diversification history of talpids, soricids, erinaceids, and solenodontids. Their resolved phylogenetic relationships now allow us to revisit the turbinal and la...
Do the relative size of the olfactory bulb, cochlea, and orbit correlate with diet in phyllostomid bats? Hall et al. (2021) found that the degree of frugivory is positively correlated with the relative size of the olfactory bulb and the orbit. The degree of animalivory is negatively correlated with the relative size of the olfactory bulb and the or...
In most tetrapods, the nasal cavity houses a bony or a cartilaginous system (i.e. turbinals or turbinates) supporting epithelium and sensory organs involved in either olfaction or heat and moisture conservation. Among extant tetrapods, mammals have on average, the largest turbinals to skull length ratio. Despite some studies in primates, Carnivora,...
Aim: Mapping Amazonian biodiversity accurately is a major challenge for integrated
conservation strategies and to study its origins. However, species boundaries and
their respective distribution are notoriously inaccurate in this region. Here, we generated
a georeferenced database of short mtDNA sequences from Amazonian frogs,
revised the species r...
Olfaction and thermoregulation are key functions for mammals. The former is critical to feeding, mating, and predator avoidance behaviors, while the latter is essential for homeothermy. Aquatic and amphibious mammals face olfactory and thermoregulatory challenges not generally encountered by terrestrial species. In mammals, the nasal cavity houses...
Assessing spider diversity remains a great challenge, especially in tropical habitats where dozens of species can locally co-occur. Pitfall trapping is one of the most widely used techniques to collect spiders, but it suffers from several biases, and its accuracy likely varies with habitat complexity. In this study, we compared the efficiency of pa...
Turbinal bones are key components of the mammalian rostrum that contribute to three critical functions: (1) homeothermy, (2) water conservation and (3) olfaction. With over 700 extant species, murine rodents (Murinae) are the most species-rich mammalian subfamily, with most of that diversity residing in the Indo-Australian Archipelago. Their evolut...
Lack of resolution on species boundaries and distribution can hamper inferences in many fields of biology, notably biogeography and conservation biology. This is particularly true in megadiverse and under-surveyed regions such as Amazonia, where species richness remains vastly underestimated. Recently, integrative approaches using a combination of...
La Guyane héberge 121 espèces d’Amphibiens Anoures dont le tiers appartient à la famille des Hylidae (41 espèces). Les Hylidae guyanais se répartissent en 5 sous-familles : Pseudinae (1 espèce), Dendropsophinae (9 espèces), Lophyohylinae (9 espèces), Scinaxinae (10 espèces) et Cophomantinae (12 espèces) (Duellman et al. 2016). La sous-famille des L...
Investigating the carnivorous rat nose through its olfactory turbinate bones.
We used molecular and morphological data to investigate the hidden diversity within the Hypsiboas semilineatus species group, and more specifically within H. geographicus, an allegedly widespread species in northern South America. As a result, the identity of H. geographicus was clarified, several candidate species were detected and one of them, fr...
Many Amazonian frog species that are considered widely distributed may actually represent polyspecific complexes.. A minute tree frog from the Guiana Shield originally assigned to the allegedly widely distributed Dendropsophus brevifrons proved to be a yet undescribed species within the D. parviceps group. We herein describe this new species and pr...
To obtain a reliable description of spider communities, robust sampling protocols are crucial. However, it remains unclear if descriptions of spider communities in tropical habitats require both day and night sampling. Here we tested whether sampling both day and night in high and low vegetation strata would lead to better diversity estimates of sp...
Climate change is expected to have important impacts on biodiversity. However, cases showing explicit links between species decline and climate are scarce, mostly because of a lack of baseline data. Tropical ectotherms with narrow altitudinal ranges are particularly sensitive to climate change; for example the frog
Pristimantis espedeus
may be at r...
We describe a new Pristimantis from French Guiana, northern South America, which is mainly distinguished from known phenotypically related congeners (i.e. species from the polyphyletic unistrigatus species group) occurring at low and mid- dle elevations in the Guiana Shield by the combination of a distinct tympanum, a lower ratio of tibia vs. hand...