Abstract

In the last two decades, new algorithms and approaches have emerged that are capable of analyze morphological changes, including the rate and extent of changes over time. The novelty of our work is to analyze the similarity of responses of coexisted species of shrews to the environmental impacts from the Late Pleistocene to the present. In the current study we use the shrew palaeocommunities known from multilayered palaeontological sites of North and Middle Ural (west ingroup) and Primor'e (east ingroup) in comparison to the modern communities from Ural, Primor'e and North-East Siberia to revealing the morphospace dynamics based on the two- and three-dimensional geometric morphometrics approaches. These approaches allow us rassessing new features of the morphospace of the palaeocommunities such as (i) association/dissociation of the morphological changes within and between species in response to the global and regional environmental impacts; (ii) species specific responses to the environmental fluctuation depending a trophic specialization in sense Hanski. In the study used unique datasets composed first time implemented of three-demensional models of the hemimandibles, dentary fragments and isolated teeth of ten Palaearctic Sorex species such as the East Asian endemic shrew, Sorex mirabilis, S. daphaenodon, S. roboratus etc. from the fossil sites and recent samples. The material has been published by Voyta et al. 2023a (https://doi.org/10.31610/trudyzin/2023.327.3.555 ) and Voyta et al. 2023b (https://doi.org/10.26879/1330 ).
The study funded by Project no. 22-24-00510 of the Russian Scientific Foundation. The microCT datasets were performed using equipment of the Core Facilities Centre “Taxon” (http://www.ckp-rf.ru/ckp/3038/) of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Saint Petersburg, Russia).