Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-1-2017
Description
During the late Pleistocene of North America (≈36,000 to 10,000 years ago), saber-toothed cats, American lions, dire wolves, and coyotes competed for prey resources at Rancho La Brea (RLB). Despite the fact that the giant short-faced bear (Arctodus simus) was the largest land carnivoran present in the fauna, there is no evidence that it competed with these other carnivores for prey at the site. Here, for the first time, we report carious lesions preserved in specimens of A. simus, recovered from RLB. Our results suggest that the population of A. simus from RLB was more omnivorous than the highly carnivorous populations from the Northwest. This dietary variation may be a consequence of different competitive pressures.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Citation Information
Figueirido, Borja; Pérez-Ramos, Alejandro; Schubert, Blaine W.; Serrano, Francisco; Farrell, Aisling B.; Pastor, Francisco J.; Neves, Aline A.; and Romero, Alejandro. 2017. Dental Caries in the Fossil Record: A Window to the Evolution of Dietary Plasticity in an Extinct Bear. Scientific Reports. Vol.7(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-18116-0 PMID: 29259277
Copyright Statement
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/