Mechanisms of competition in mammals during the Late Neogene

Alessandro Mondanaro

Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, Università degli Studi di Firenze 50121, Italy ; alessandro.mondanaro@unifi.it Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, dell’Ambiente e delle Risorse, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico
II, Italy
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0325-7066 

How to cite: Mondanaro (2018). Mechanisms of competition in mammals during the Late Neogene. Fossilia, Volume 2018: 57-60. https://doi.org/10.32774/FosRepPal.20.1810.085760

Bullet-Points Abstract

• Although rare, megaherbivores negatively affect species diversity at several trophic levels.
  
• In contrast, it has been suggested that they favour coexistence among top predators.
  
• We show megaherbivores controlled ecosystem functioning in Neogene large mammals.
  
• Carnivores were a factor in controlling the diversity of small prey.
  

Keywords: Predation to prey ratio; Megaherbivores; Apparent competition.

Fig. 1. The geographical distribution of fossil localities included in the analyses (left). Geographical coordinates were rotated to the present for plotting purposes. To the right, for each species it is plotted the minimum convex polygon including all species occurrences (right)

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