Seeds, browse, and tooth wear: a sheep perspective.

ABSTRACT: While grazing as a selective factor towards hypsodont dentition on mammals has gained a lot of attention, the importance of fruits and seeds as fallback resources for many browsing ungulates has caught much less attention. Controlled-food experiments, by reducing the dietary range, allow for a direct quantification of the effect of each type of items separately on enamel abrasion. We present the results of a dental microwear texture analysis on 40 ewes clustered into four different controlled diets: clover alone, and then three diets composed of clover together with either barley, corn, or chestnuts. Among the seed-eating groups, only the barley one shows higher complexity than the seed-free group. Canonical discriminant analysis is successful at correctly classifying the majority of clove

SUBMITTER: Ramdarshan A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4983574 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature