Dietary adaptations in an ungulate community from the late Pliocene of Greece Florent Rivals a, ⁎, Athanassios Athanassiou b,c a ICREA and IPHES (Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social), Àrea de Prehistòria, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Plaça Imperial Tarraco 1, 43005 Tarragona, Spain b Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Department of Palaeoanthropology–Speleology, Ardittou 34B, 11636 Athens, Greece c National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Historical Geology and Palaeontology, Panepistimiopolis, 15784 Athens, Greece ABSTRACT ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 10 December 2007 Received in revised form 3 April 2008 Accepted 16 May 2008 Keywords: Microwear Mesowear Palaeodiet Ungulates Late Pliocene Greece The dietary morphological methods of mesowear and microwear were applied to ungulates of the late Pliocene fauna of Sésklo (Thessaly, Greece). The results provide evidence for the predominance of open grassland in the area, as the most common species, Equus stenonis, was a strict grazer. The rare cervid cf. Croizetoceros ramosus was the only browser. The antelopes (genera Gazella and Gazellospira) yielded discrepant microwear and mesowear results. This is interpreted as an indication of regional or seasonal dietary resource differentiation, inferring that the antelopes were probably mixed feeders that grazed occasionally or periodically. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Fossil herbivore dietary morphology has been frequently used to infer their diet, and subsequently to reconstruct the palaeoenvironmental conditions of the geographical area and the time interval in which they lived. The Pliocene epoch is climatically characterised by a general trend of global cooling, which began in the Miocene and continued into the Pleistocene (Shackleton,1995). The cooling of the environment, associated with considerable drying and increased seasonality in the Mediterranean region (Suc, 1984), may have contributed to the spread of more open landscapes during this time. The late Pliocene deposits from eastern Mediterranean (Greece and Anatolia) and western Mediterranean (south- ern Iberia) show increasing aridity in this time period (Suc and Popescu, 2005; Fortelius et al., 2006), which largely corresponds to the biozone MN17 of the European mammalian biochronology. Such a climatic shift was followed with a change in vegetation. Grasslands replaced forests so grazing mammals spread at the expense of browsers (Fortelius et al., 2006). More specifically, after an increase of browsers in the MN15, Fortelius et al. (2006) observe a change in the late Pliocene, starting in the MN16 and increasing in MN17, when hypsodont species and grazers increase significantly, whereas browsers gradually decrease. This trend is also observed in the fossil record from Greece, where forest and mixed dwellers are gradually replaced by open habitat dwellers (Kostopoulos et al., 2007). Hypsodonty has been used as a proxy for habitat openness and climatic reconstructions, particularly for aridity, and is known to be correlated to climatic changes (Janis and Fortelius, 1988; Fortelius et al., 2002; Fortelius et al., 2006). This relation has been confirmed by several studies (Strömberg, 2002; Strömberg, 2004; Mihlbachler and Solounias, 2006). However, for some extant taxa hypsodonty is known to be different than their diet, for example in American pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) or in many Camelidae. In the fossil record, such discrepancies were revealed in late Miocene North American Equidae (MacFadden et al., 1999), as well as in the Antilocapridae and Camelidae (Semprebon and Rivals, 2007a,b). The evolution of hypsodonty related to aridity is linked to many factors in the composition of the diet such as fibrousness or abrasiveness (due to presence of intracellular silica or extraneous grit) (Fortelius, 1985; Janis, 1988; Janis and Fortelius, 1988; Williams and Kay, 2001). Such changes are also detectable using dental wear analysis, which additionally yields more specific information about the food properties. We propose here to use dental mesowear and microwear analysis to characterize characterise dietary adaptations in an ungulate community from one of those dry areas of the Pliocene. We selected the Sésklo locality because of the important specific diversity and the availability of relatively large samples. 2. Locality, fauna and studied material The locality of Sésklo (Magnesia, Thessaly, Greece) has yielded a rich and diverse mammal fauna, biochronologically dated in the lower MN17 zone, as defined in Mein (1990) (MNQ17 according to Guérin, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 265 (2008) 134–139 ⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 977 55 9734; fax: +34 977 55 95 97. E-mail address: florent.rivals@icrea.es (F. Rivals). 0031-0182/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.palaeo.2008.05.001 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/palaeo