Skip to main content
×
×
Home

The Mescal Cave Fauna (San Bernardino County, California) and testing assumptions of habitat fidelity in the Quaternary fossil record

  • Mary Allison Stegner
Abstract

The late Pleistocene and Holocene vertebrate fossil record for the northern Mojave Desert (southwestern USA) is known primarily from five sites. Until now, only two of these have been radiometrically dated, and temporal placement of the others has been based on stratigraphic or biostratigraphic correlation, leading to circular interpretations of mammal extirpations in the Mojave. Here, I report a revised and complete faunal list for Mescal Cave, along with 22 AMS radiocarbon dates from 5 vertebrate taxa recovered from its deposits. The results reported here demonstrate time-averaging in Mescal Cave encompassing around ~ 34 ka, a maximum age 14 ka older and minimum age 10 ka younger than previously thought. Furthermore, radiocarbon analyses suggest local extirpation of Marmota flaviventris around 3.6 cal ka BP, considerably younger than expected based on regional patterns of warming and aridification in the Mojave. Conversely, radiocarbon dates from another presumably boreal species, Neotoma cinerea, are considerably older than expected, suggesting either that climate change at this site did not directly mirror regional patterns, that habitat requirements for these two species are not strictly boreal or cool/mesic as has often been assumed, or that local edaphic conditions and/or competitive interactions overrode the regional climatic controls on theses species' distribution.

Copyright
Corresponding author
* Fax: + 1 510 643 6275. E-mail address: astegner@berkeley.edu
References
Hide All
Bronk Ramsey, C. (2009). Bayesian analysis of radiocarbon dates. Radiocarbon 51, 337360.
Brown, J.H. (1978). The theory of insular biogeography and the distribution of boreal birds and mammals. Great Basin Naturalist Memoirs 2, 209227.
Brown, T.A., Nelson, D.E., Vogel, J.S., Southon, J.R. (1988). Improved collagen extraction by modified longin method. Radiocarbon 30, 171177.
Cameron, G.N. (1971). Niche overlap and competition in woodrats. Journal of Mammalogy 52, 288296.
Cameron, G.N., Rainey, D.G. (1972). Habitat utilization by Neotoma lepida in the Mohave Desert. Journal of Mammalogy 53, 251266.
Dial, K.P. (1988). Three sympatric species of Neotoma: dietary specialization and coexistence. Oecologia 76, 531537.
Floyd, C.H. (2004). Marmot distribution and habitat associations in the Great Basin. American Naturalist 64, 471481.
Floyd, C.H., Van Vuren, D.H., May, B. (2005). Marmots on Great Basin mountain tops: using genetics to test a biogeographic paradigm. Ecology 86, 21452153.
Gavin, D.G. (2014). Climate refugia: joint inference from fossil records, species distribution models and phylogeography. New Phytologist 1, 3754.
Goodwin, H.T., Reynolds, R.E. (1989). Late Quaternary Sciuridae from Kokoweef Cave, San Bernardino County, California. Bulletin of the Southern California Academy of Sciences 88, 2132.
Grayson, D.K. (2000). Mammalian response to the Middle Holocene climatic change in the Great Basin of the western United States. Journal of Biogeography 27, 181192.
Grayson, D.K. (2011). The Great Basin: a Natural Prehistory. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Grayson, D.K., Madsen, D.B. (2000). Biogeographic implication of recent low-elevation recolonization by Neotoma cinerea in the Great Basin. Journal of Mammalogy 81, 11001105.
Grayson, D.K., Livington, S.D., Rickart, E., Shaver III, M.W. (1996). Biogeographic significance of low-elevation records for Neotoma cinerea from the Northern Bonneville Basin, Utah. Great Basin Naturalist 56, 191196.
Jefferson, G.T. (1991). Rancholabrean age vertebrates from the Southeastern Mojave Desert, California. Reynolds, R.E. Crossing the borders: quaternary studies in eastern California and southwestern Nevada Redlands, California, Mojave Desert Quaternry Research Center, San Bernardino County Museum Association Special Publication. 2740.
Kueppers, L.M., Snyder, M.A., Sloan, L.C., Zavaleta, E.S., Fulfrost, B. (2005). Modeled regional climate change and California endemic oak ranges. PNAS 102, 1628116286.
Lomolino, M.V., Brown, J.H., Davie, R. (1989). Island biogeography of montane forest mammal in the American Southwest. Ecology 70, 180194.
Lyons, K.A. (2003). A quantitative assessment of the range shifts of Pleistocene mammals. Journal of Mammalogy 84, 385402.
Mensing, S.A. (2001). Late-Glacial and Early Holocene vegetation and climate change near Owens Lake, Eastern California. Quaternary Research 55, 5765.
Moritz, C., Patton, J.L., Conroy, C.J., Parra, J.L., White, G.C., Beissinger, S.R. (2008). Impact of a century of climate change on small-mammal communities in Yosemite National Park, USA. Science 322, 261264.
Quade, J. (1986). Late Quaternary environmental changes in the Upper Las Vegas Valley, Nevada. Quaternary Research 26, 340357.
R Core Team, (2013). R: a Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.(URL http://www.R-project.org/).
Rapacciuolo, G. (2014). Beyond a warming fingerprint: individualistic biogeographic responses to heterogeneous climate change in California. Global Change Biology 20, 28412855.
Reid, F.A. (2006). Peterson Guide to Mammals of North America. 4th ed.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York.
Reimer, P.J. (2013). IntCal13 and Marine13 radiocarbon age calibration curves 0-50,000 years cal BP. Radiocarbon 55, 18591887.
Reynolds, R.E., Reynolds, R.L., Bell, C.J., Czaplewski, N.J., Goodwin, H.T., Mead, J.I., Roth, B. (1991a). The Kokoweef Cave faunal assemblage. Reynolds, R.E. Crossing the Borders: Quaternary Studies in Eastern California and Southwestern Nevada San Bernardino County Museum Association, Redlands.97103.
Reynolds, R.E., Reynolds, R.L., Bell, C.J., Pitzer, B. (1991b). Vertebrate remains from Antelope Vcave, Mescal Range, San Bernardion County, California. Reynolds, R.E. Crossing the Borders: Quaternary Studies in Eastern California and Southwestern Nevada San Bernardino County Museum Association, Redlands.107109.
Rickart, E.A., Robson, S.L., Heaney, L.R. (2008). Mammals of Great Basin National Park, Nevada: comparitive field surveys and assessment of faunal change. Monographs of the Western North American Naturalist 4, 77114.
Stirton, R.A. (1938). UCMP Field Notes.
Stuiver, M., Polcah, H.A. (1977). Reporting of 14C data. Radiocarbon 19, 355363.
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, (2014). Version 2014.3. (< iucnredlist.org > Downloaded on 17 November 2014).
USGCRP, (2009). Global climate change impacts in the United States. Karl, T.R., Melillo, J.M., Peterson, T.C. United States Global Change Research Program Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, USA.
Van Vuren, D., Armitage, K.B. (1994). Survival of dispersing and philopatric yellow-bellied marmots: what is the cost of dispersal?. Oikos 69, 179181.
VertNet database, (2014). Version 2014-09-26. http://portal.vertnet.org/search(Downloaded on 17 November 2014).
Vogel, J.S., Southon, J.R., Nelson, D.E. (1987). Catalyst and binder effects in the use of filamentos graphite for AMS. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B29, 5056.
von den Driesch, A. (1976). A guide to the measurement of animal bones from archaeological sites. Peabody Museum Bulletin 1 Harvard University, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, .
Recommend this journal

Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this journal to your organisation's collection.

Quaternary Research
  • ISSN: 0033-5894
  • EISSN: 1096-0287
  • URL: /core/journals/quaternary-research
Please enter your name
Please enter a valid email address
Who would you like to send this to? *
×

Keywords:

Type Description Title
WORD
Supplementary materials

Stegner supplementary material
Supplementary Material

 Word (75 KB)
75 KB

Metrics

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 7 *
Loading metrics...

Abstract views

Total abstract views: 67 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between 20th January 2017 - 13th June 2018. This data will be updated every 24 hours.