Coleopteran faunas as indicators of interglacial climates in central and southern England

Abstract

Coleopteran assemblages are now known from most of the British interglacials. Almost all the faunas discussed here date from that phase of each interglacial when mixed deciduous forests dominated the landscape and where its thermal maximum might have been expected. For convenience the interglacials will be provisionally allocated to the notional framework of the Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) numbers. These allocations progressively become more difficult to apply to the older interglacials and for that reason the faunas will be dealt with in the order of increasing age. The enormous insect fauna from the Holocene has been extensively published elsewhere and will not be dealt with further here. In total just over forty interglacial beetle faunas have been described from Britain, all of them from locations in southern and central England. A selection of the more important of these will be discussed here. Altogether about 500 species of beetle have been identified from British interglacial sites and many more specimens have been obtained that can only be determined to the generic or family level. Although the majority of beetle species in interglacial assemblages are members of the present day fauna of the British Isles, there are a number of species which do not now occur in Britain and whose modern geographic range is predominantly southern European. It is these exotic species that are often the most interesting from a palaeoclimatic point of view. The occurrences of a selection of these species will be given here. Wherever possible, quantified estimates of the interglacial thermal climates will be made, using the Mutual Climatic Range (MCR) method.