Habitats of Pleistocene megaherbivores reconstructed from the frozen fauna remains ...
The Late Pleistocene landscape in northern Eurasia and North America was inhabited by a specific megafaunal complex, which largely disappeared during the Pleistocene/Holocene transition. Vegetation changes are considered as one of the factors responsible for these extinctions, but the structure and...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Dataset |
| Language: | English |
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Dryad
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.sxksn02zs https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.sxksn02zs |
| Summary: | The Late Pleistocene landscape in northern Eurasia and North America was inhabited by a specific megafaunal complex, which largely disappeared during the Pleistocene/Holocene transition. Vegetation changes are considered as one of the factors responsible for these extinctions, but the structure and composition of the Pleistocene vegetation are still poorly known. Here we complement previous studies by comparing the taxonomic composition of the plant remains found in the gastrointestinal tracts of the frozen carcasses of Pleistocene megaherbivores with the species composition of the current Siberian vegetation. We compiled a dataset of palaeobotanical records from frozen individuals of Pleistocene megaherbivores found in northern Siberia and Beringia and dated to the period from more than 50 kyr BP to 9 kyr BP. We also compiled a dataset of vegetation plots from several regions in Siberia. We analysed the similarity in taxonomic composition of plants between these two datasets using a novel method that ... : Supporting data to the manuscript Axmanová et al.: Habitats of Pleistocene megaherbivores reconstructed from the frozen fauna remains. Ecography. DOI 10.1111/ecog.04940 This database contains information on plant remains identified in frozen megafauna individuals. We compiled plant records reported from the Pleistocene and early Holocene frozen megaherbivores found in northern Siberia, Alaska and the Yukon Territory. The palaeobotanical data include pollen+spores, macrofossils and DNA analyses reported from gastrointestinal tracts of frozen fauna or coprolites (for more details see Table A2, the manuscript and Supporting information. Plant nomenclature follows Cherepanov (1995) for vascular plants and Ignatov & Afonina (1992) for bryophytes. All frozen animal samples are sorted according to their radiocarbon dating, with the same IDs as in the manuscript. Following Ukraintseva (2013) and Willerslev et al. (2014), we used the division of individual samples into periods of pre-LGM (50–25 kyr BP; called ... |
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