Ancestral feeding state of ruminants reconsidered: earliest grazing adaptation claims a mixed condition for Cervidae
Background: Specialised leaf-eating is almost universally regarded as the ancestral state of all ruminants, yet little evidence can be cited in support of this assumption, apart from the fact that all early ruminants had low crowned cheek teeth. Instead, recent years have seen the emergence evidence contradicting the conventional view that low tooth crowns always […]
Functional Characterization of Ungulate Molars Using the Abrasion-Attrition Wear Gradient: A New Method for Reconstructing Paleodiets
The analysis of fossil ungulate cheek teeth has long been one of the main sources of information about the terrestrial environments of the Cenozoic, but the methods used to extract this information have been either imprecise or prohibitively laborious. Here we present a method based on relative facet development that is quantitative, robust, and rapid. […]