Biogeographic problem-solving reveals the Late Pleistocene translocation of a short-faced bear to the California Channel Islands.

ABSTRACT: An accurate understanding of biodiversity of the past is critical for contextualizing biodiversity patterns and trends in the present. Emerging techniques are refining our ability to decipher otherwise cryptic human-mediated species translocations across the Quaternary, yet these techniques are often used in isolation, rather than part of an interdisciplinary hypothesis-testing toolkit, limiting their scope and application. Here we illustrate the use of such an integrative approach and report the occurrence of North America's largest terrestrial mammalian carnivore, the short-faced bear, Arctodus simus, from Daisy Cave (CA-SMI-261), an important early human occupation site on the California Channel Islands. We identified the specimen by corroborating morphological, protein, and mitogenomic

SUBMITTER: Mychajliw AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7494929 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature