The full programme book (PDF) - Royal Geographical Society

THEME 9: PALAEOECOLOGY
Beetles, bones and biozones: Quaternary palaeozoology in relation to
environmental change
Adrian M Lister
Department of Earth Sciences, Natural History Museum, London SW7 5BD
The study of Quaternary palaeozoology has made enormous strides in the past 50 years –
aided by both conceptual and technological advances, and the much firmer chronological
framework provided by stratigraphic and dating refinements. The sequence of faunal
change though Middle and Late Pleistocene temperate stages is better known for the UK
than anywhere else, allowing analysis of faunal turnover in relation to environmental
change, although cold faunas preceding the last glaciation remain less well understood.
Landmark studies of beetles and, more recently, other animal groups, have provided
important proxies of environmental change, and have led to niche-modelling approaches
with both retrodictive and predictive power. Direct insight into the ecology of individual
organisms and species is provided by methods barely conceived 50 years ago, such as
the reconstruction of diet using dental microwear, mesowear and stable isotope analysis.
Puzzling non-analogue assemblages are now increasingly understood, as much in terms
of varying migratory response rates of different organisms as of genuinely non-analogue
environmental drivers. Large radiocarbon datasets allow detailed mapping of range shifts
through time, providing insights especially into the role of refugia and the dynamics of late
Quaternary megafaunal extinctions.