Browsing by Author "Douglas, Regan"

Mesowear, a method that scores the wear of teeth to determine the amount of abrasive material in the diet, has long been used to understand palaeoecology though the diet of herbivores. Until recently, proboscidean teeth could not be used for these studies. The method of mesowear angle analysis introduced by Saarinen et al. in 2015 has made this possible by measuring the relative angle between the enamel ridges and dentine valleys of the lophs of proboscidean teeth to account for wear. This study compares the average mesowear angles of 428 specimens of Pleistocene Mammuthus to determine geospatial variation across the genus as well as within the species M. primigenius. These results are then corroborated with previous studies of other palaeoecological proxies to ensure they truly reflect a means to determine palaeoecology through proboscidean mesowear. Overall, this study finds that significant geospatial variation and little interspecific variation of Mammuthus proves that mammoths were highly adaptable herbivores capable of surviving in a wide array of the harshest habitats and browsing or grazing habits were not determined by species morphologies, but the environments they inhabited.