Variations in dental morphologies of yellow-necked mouse (Apodemus flavicollis Melchior, 1834) from Nizhneirginsky Grotto sediments (Middle Urals) in a phylogeographical context

Abstract

Yellow-necked mouse (Apodemus flavicollis Melchior, 1834) is a typical representative of European fauna, whose distribution range is confined to the broad-leaved forest zone and occupies a considerable territory of Eurasia from Great Britain and northern Spain to the Urals. The Urals is the eastern boundary of the distribution of yellow-necked mouse. The yellow-necked mouse surviving in the Balkan region recolonized the main part of the Western Palearctic region after the Last Glacial Maximum. Thus, all of Europe and Western Russia were rapidly colonized. There are little data on the Holocene history of A. flavicollis in the east of the range. Therefore, regional populations in the Urals are of particular interest. We analyzed the variability of molars of yellow-necked mouse from modern populations (marginal and from the main part of the range) and fossil molars of yellow-necked mouse in the phylogeographical context. A comparative analysis of the morphological variability of yellow-necked mouse molars was performed using a set of metric and non-metric dental variables. We considered the first and second upper and lower molars of the yellow-necked mouse from recent populations: Zhytomir region (Ukraine), n = 76; Bashkortostan Republic (Russia), n = 84; Sverdlovsk region (Russia), n = 68, and Holocene samples from Nizhneirginsky Grotto sediments (Sverdlovsk Region, Russia), n = 43. As a result of this study, the morphological specificity of modern and Holocene A. flavicollis from the Urals territory was revealed. The obtained results allowed to make assumptions about the history of A. flavicollis in the Urals and to compare these results with those of the European colonization of this species.