Quantitative paleoenvironmental reconstructions based on large mammal communities in Björn Kurtén's work and since then — revising the case of later Late Miocene Old World “Hipparion faunas”

Functional traits of herbivorous mammals provide tools for reconstructing past environments. In 1952, Björn Kurtén used distribution of ecomorphological features in fossil herbivorous mammal communities from Late Miocene “Hipparion faunas” of Eurasia to characterize their paleoenvironments as “steppe”, “forest” and “mixed” types. We tested Kurtén's results with a revised set of ecometric methods. We used dental ecometric estimates of mean annual temperature and precipitation, net primary productivity, and normalized difference vegetation index to compare Miocene localities with modern biomes, and dental mesowear to estimate woody and grass cover in the paleoenvironments. Our results agree with Kurtén's, indicating steppe-edge environments in northern China, wooded paleoenvironments in Pikermi, Greece, and central Europe, and open woodland-grassland environment in Maragheh, Iran. Our analyses indicate the presence of wooded grassland savanna in Lothagam and tropical forest in Lukeino in East Africa, further demonstrating paleoenvironmental variation and ecological diversity within later Late Miocene “Hipparion faunas”.