Late Quaternary communities of shrews, Soricidae, from Ural and Far East Regions of Russia: A protocol for the multifactorial morphospace building

Abstract

The present paper is a preliminary attempt to develop a protocol for analyzing Late Pleistocene and Holocene paleocommunities of soricids using modern approaches for the morphological data analysis. First, we assessed the abilities of fossil soricid collections from Ural and Far East localities to provide a complex interregional analysis of the phenotype variation. Accordingly, for the first time in the general context, the study provides a species list and chronological position of Ural and Far East shrew fossil samples in terms of inter- and intraregional comparisons to reveal general and specific responses of paleocommunities to climatic fluctuations. Second, under the modern approaches, we prepared 182 three-dimensional models of hemimandibles or isolated m1 and built the morphospace of m1 shape for seven Sorex species from the Upper Pleistocene layer MKl-13 and Middle Holocene layer MKl-7 of Medvezhyi Klyk Cave (South Primorye, Russia). Recent samples from East Siberia (Yakutia) and the northern part of the Far East (Magadanskaya Oblast' and Khabarovsky Kray; “cold” habitats) and South Primorye (“warm” habitats) were included into morphospace to actualize potential responses of the fossil samples to Late Quaternary climate fluctuations. Our analysis revealed: (i) a weak reaction of m1 shape of almost all species to the “cold” and “warm” environmental conditions, except S. daphaenodon Thomas, 1907 and S. caecutiens Laxmann, 1788; (ii) two groups of species, namely “generalized” and “specialized” in m1 shape, in line with the idea of distribution of trophic niches among coexisted shrews; (iii) a diagnostic character for fossil samples of S. unguiculatus Dobson, 1890 and S. isodon Turov, 1924.