Application of herbivore ecometrics to reconstruct Neogene terrestrial palaeoenvironments in Falcón, Venezuela

Despite its important position close to the Isthmus of Panama, and abundance of fossil localities, the palaeoenvironment of the Falcon Basin in northwestern Venezuela has been understudied. The basin includes a sequence containing 6 terrestrial fossil assemblages, of which 5 are well-sampled enough for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction. Here we use these assemblages as a test case for taxon-free approaches in the Neotropics, that have been used in studies elsewhere, including dental functional traits, body mass and mesowear. Mesowear reveals browsing and grazing diets from the Late Miocene to the Late Pleistocene, and though the toxodontids (the most abundant mammalian herbivores) show a consistent browsing signal, other approaches support an environment which was largely more open than previously suggested. We find limited evidence for any dramatic climatic shift, instead finding more gradual changes in precipitation and tree cover. Ultimately, we
find enough consistency in our results with those of other proxies to suggest that the methods employed here could potentially be applied to other localities in South America.