Victoria Herridge

The distinctive features and fossil content of some caves from eastern Sicily (San Teodoro, Donnavilla, Fulco, Taormina, Tremilia, Spinagallo), altogether spanning from the middle Pleistocene until the beginning of the Holocene, are discussed. Although dating on vertebrate and/or invertebrate remains is available in few instances, coastal notches and marine terraces correlate with the caves, provide further chronological constraint. The San Teodoro and Spinagallo caves are the best known, whereas the Tremilia cave deserves to be better analysed. Most caves, but not the San Teodoro one (including only terrestrial faunas), testify to the transition from submarine coastal environments (documented by biogenic crusts, borings, shelly sediments), to continental conditions (vertebrate remains of the Paleoloxodon falconeri, Maccagnone and San Teodoro Faunistic Complexes). The fossil register preserved in these cavities represents a source of information useful to (1) reconstruct the palaeog...

Evolution on islands, together with the often extreme phenotypic changes associated with it, has attracted much interest from evolutionary biologists. However, measuring the rate of change of phenotypic traits of extinct animals can be challenging, in part due to the incompleteness of the fossil record. Here, we use combined molecular and fossil evidence to define the minimum and maximum rate of dwarfing in an extinct Mediterranean dwarf elephant from Puntali Cave (Sicily).1 Despite the challenges associated with recovering ancient DNA from warm climates,2 we successfully retrieved a mitogenome from a sample with an estimated age between 175,500 and 50,000 years. Our results suggest that this specific Sicilian elephant lineage evolved from one of the largest terrestrial mammals that ever lived3 to an island species weighing less than 20% of its original mass with an estimated mass reduction between 0.74 and 200.95 kg and height reduction between 0.15 and 41.49 mm per generation. We show that combining ancient DNA with paleontological and geochronological evidence can constrain the timing of phenotypic changes with greater accuracy than could be achieved using any source of evidence in isolation.

Table S2: Mandibular shape analyses, including the variables log centroid size, sex and location as well as the interaction term between size and location.; Table S3: Cranial shape analyses, including the variables log centroid size, sex and location as well as the interaction term between size and location.; Table S4: Cranial (top) and mandibular (bottom) analyses of variance for non-giant and giant <i>Eliomys quercinus</i> specimens.; Table S5: Cranial (top) and mandibular (bottom) analyses of variance for non-giant and giant dormice, including fossil giants.; Table S6: Fit of extant and fossil specimens within the PSvS model for the cranial (top) and mandibular (bottom) dataset. Including Procrustes fits of shapes compared to predicted shape based on both centroid size and shape.

Cranial (top) and mandibular (bottom) size variation in extant <i>Eliomys</i> species per geographic region. Bracket numbers on the x-axis indicate the number of specimens analyzed within the specified region. Side panes B, C, E and F indicate size variation within mainland (B, E) and insular (C, F) populations.

Insular gigantism—evolutionary increases in body size from small-bodied mainland ancestors—is a conceptually significant, but poorly studied, evolutionary phenomenon. Gigantism is widespread on Mediterranean islands, particularly among fossil and extant dormice. These include an extant giant population of <i>Eliomys quercinus</i> on Formentera, the giant Balearic genus †<i>Hypnomys</i> and the exceptionally large †<i>Leithia melitensis</i> of Pleistocene Sicily. We quantified patterns of cranial and mandibular shape and their relationships to head size (allometry) among mainland and insular dormouse populations, asking to what extent the morphology of island giants is explained by allometry. We find that gigantism in dormice is not simply an extrapolation of the allometric trajectory of their mainland relatives. Instead, a large portion of their distinctive cranial and mandibular morphology resulted from the population- or species-specific evoluti...

The TrowelBlazers project provides an example of how public participation can radically influence an archival heritage project. Conceived as a Tumblr site where a limited group could post content celebrating female archaeologists, geologists, and palaeontologists, we soon allowed ‘guest’ posts, which rapidly broadened the scope of our project. Through our participatory social media networks, TrowelBlazers became involved in STEM, feminist, and heritage actions. Contact with organisations promoting women’s involvement in science led to collaborations with broader feminist networks including The Women’s Room UK, Finding Ada Project, and ScienceGrrl alongside invited contributions to science education events (e.g. by the UK Environment and Science Research Council). TrowelBlazers hosted very successful Wikipedia edit-athons for Ada Lovelace Day at the Natural History Museum, London, and took part in Brown University’s event. More importantly, the accessibility and frequently crowdsourced nature of our content have allowed TrowelBlazers to directly engage with the nonacademic public to promote awareness of women’s contributions to heritage to a much broader public through activities like a feature in a magazine for pre-teen girls, a video project with a performance artist who plays an idealised girl’s role model, and even a toy maker.

Archival resources are a key part of disseminating a vision of archaeological heritage that captures the public imagination, engages a wider audience, and dictates the narrative of disciplinary history. The successes of the TrowelBlazers project show there is tremendous scope to reset imaginations and the popular conception of archaeology. This chapter will outline how a completely voluntary, grassroots, community-sourced activist approach has been able to successfully draw out and publicize narratives from archival resources as well as oral and personal histories to engage community activism, public interest, and to encourage and support underrepresented groups to engage with archaeology and heritage.

The TrowelBlazers project is a community-sourced digital archive of short biographies and images of women whose significant contributions to the fields of archaeology, geology, and paleontology have often been overlooked. Originating in a conversation on Twitter between four early-career researchers, the project began life as a tumblr blog designed to share inspirational images and stories of women researchers in the past. Different social media accounts allow us to interact with a number of communities, including students, academics, professional archaeologists, archivists, and museum staff, as well as members of the general public and professional organizations. We have had coverage in mainstream media, hosted a wikipedia editathon, coauthored a chapter in an ebook, and written several guest posts on blogs of like-minded collaborating organisations, such as institutional archives. By not only focusing on individual women but also identifying the networks in which they worked, we have been able to develop a uniquely connected approach with multiple partners in real-world engagement with advocacy groups and the wider public. This paper explores how understanding how multiple audiences engage with different social media, online, and real-life aspects of the TrowelBlazers project is key to maintaining interest, creating new content, and building awareness of women’s contributions.

The 1-m-tall dwarf elephant Palaeoloxodon falconeri from the Pleistocene of Sicily (Italy) is an extreme example of insular dwarfism and epitomizes the Island Rule. Based on scaling of life-history (LH) traits with body mass, P. falconeri is widely considered to be ‘r-selected’ by truncation of the growth period, associated with an early onset of reproduction and an abbreviated lifespan. These conjectures are, however, at odds with predictions from LH models for adaptive shifts in body size on islands. To settle the LH strategy of P. falconeri, we used bone, molar, and tusk histology to infer growth rates, age at first reproduction, and longevity. Our results from all approaches are congruent and provide evidence that the insular dwarf elephant grew at very slow rates over an extended period; attained maturity at the age of 15 years; and had a minimum lifespan of 68 years. This surpasses not only the values predicted from body mass but even those of both its giant sister taxon (P. a...

Ancient remains found in permafrost represent a rare opportunity to study past ecosystems. Here, we present an exceptionally well-preserved ancient bird carcass found in the Siberian permafrost, along with a radiocarbon date and a reconstruction of its complete mitochondrial genome. The carcass was radiocarbon dated to approximately 44–49 ka BP, and was genetically identified as a female horned lark. This is a species that usually inhabits open habitat, such as the steppe environment that existed in Siberia at the time. This near-intact carcass highlights the potential of permafrost remains for evolutionary studies that combine both morphology and ancient nucleic acids.

Insular gigantism—evolutionary increases in body size from small-bodied mainland ancestors—is a conceptually significant, but poorly studied, evolutionary phenomenon. Gigantism is widespread on Mediterranean islands, particularly among fossil and extant dormice. These include an extant giant population of Eliomys quercinus on Formentera, the giant Balearic genus † Hypnomys and the exceptionally large † Leithia melitensis of Pleistocene Sicily. We quantified patterns of cranial and mandibular shape and their relationships to head size (allometry) among mainland and insular dormouse populations, asking to what extent the morphology of island giants is explained by allometry. We find that gigantism in dormice is not simply an extrapolation of the allometric trajectory of their mainland relatives. Instead, a large portion of their distinctive cranial and mandibular morphology resulted from the population- or species-specific evolutionary shape changes. Our findings suggest that body siz...

ABSTRACT Dwarf elephants and dwarf deer are now extinct, but between 800,000 and 3,000 years ago they lived on islands throughout the Mediterranean, Indonesia and off the coasts of Siberia and California. They are remarkable examples of rapid evolution during a period of fluctuating climate and sea level change. As sea levels rose and fell in the Mediterranean, the size of the islands and their distance from the mainland altered dramatically, accompanied by shifts in resource availability and type, and opportunities for dispersal. Indeed, at times of low sea level, land bridges may have been formed. Here, we present efforts to provide chronological constraint on the fossil record (dwarf elephants and deer) preserved in coastal caves and karst settings of the Mediterranean and make preliminary correlations with climate change. We have revisited numerous sites on the Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus, following in the footsteps of pioneering verterbrate paleontologists. Not least, among these researchers, was Dorothea Bate, who was instrumental in presenting fossil evidence for the endemic extinct, goat-like ruminant Myotragus balearicus found in many locations of Mallorca (Bate, 1914). A variety of state-of-the-art dating techniques have been employed on cave calcites, sediments and shells to estimate the age of burial, including MC-ICPMS U-Th, optically-stimulated luminescence (OSL) and amino-amino acid racemization geochronology. Fossil teeth from museum archives have also been sectioned for electron-spin resonance dating. Use of multiple dating techniques presents an opportunity for independent verification and potentially more robust geochronological constraint. We present here preliminary efforts to constrain the age of two dwarf elephant taxa currently recognised for Sicily and Malta: 'small-sized' Palaeoloxodon falconeri (Busk, 1867) and 'large-sized' P. mnaidriensis (Leith-Adams, 1874). P. melitensis (Falconer, in Busk, 1867) has fallen out of common usage as it was mistakenly characterised as a 'medium-sized' dwarf taxon (Vaufrey, 1929), for which, based on material from Sicily, there was thought be little evidence (Palombo and Ferretti, 2005). The types of all three species are from Malta, and the

The insular dwarfism seen in Pleistocene elephants has come to epitomize the island rule; yet our understanding of this phenomenon is hampered by poor taxonomy. For Mediterranean dwarf elephants, where the most extreme cases of insular dwarfism are observed, a key systematic question remains unresolved: are all taxa phyletic dwarfs of a single mainland species Palaeoloxodon antiquus (straight-tusked elephant), or are some referable to Mammuthus (mammoths)? Ancient DNA and geochronological evidence have been used to support a Mammuthus origin for the Cretan 'Palaeoloxodon' creticus, but these studies have been shown to be flawed. On the basis of existing collections and recent field discoveries, we present new, morphological evidence for the taxonomic status of 'P'. creticus, and show that it is indeed a mammoth, most probably derived from Early Pleistocene Mammuthus meridionalis or possibly Late Pliocene Mammuthus rumanus. We also show that Mammuthus creticus is smaller than other known insular dwarf mammoths, and is similar in size to the smallest dwarf Palaeoloxodon species from Sicily and Malta, making it the smallest mammoth species known to have existed. These findings indicate that extreme insular dwarfism has evolved to a similar degree independently in two elephant lineages.