Dietary isotopes of Madagascar's extinct megafauna reveal holocene browsing and grazing guilds.

Megafauna play a disproportionate role in developing and maintaining their biomes, by regulating plant dispersal, community structure and nutrient cycling. Understanding the ecological roles of extinct megafaunal communities, for example through dietary reconstruction using isotope analysis, is necessary to determine pre-human states and set evidence-based restoration goals. We use C and N isotopic analyses to reconstruct Holocene feeding guilds in Madagascar's extinct megaherbivores, which included elephant birds, hippopotami and giant tortoises that occurred across multiple habitats and elevations.

Biodiversity Conservation and the Earth System: Mind the Gap.

One of the most striking human impacts on global biodiversity is the ongoing depletion of large vertebrates from terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Recent work suggests this loss of megafauna can affect processes at biome or Earth system scales with potentially serious impacts on ecosystem structure and function, ecosystem services, and biogeochemical cycles. We argue that our contemporary approach to biodiversity conservation focuses on spatial scales that are too small to adequately address these impacts.

Complementarity, completeness and quality of long-term faunal archives in an Asian biodiversity hotspot.

Long-term baselines on biodiversity change through time are crucial to inform conservation decision-making in biodiversity hotspots, but environmental archives remain unavailable for many regions. Extensive palaeontological, zooarchaeological and historical records and indigenous knowledge about past environmental conditions exist for China, a megadiverse country experiencing large-scale biodiversity loss, but their potential to understand past human-caused faunal turnover is not fully assessed. We investigate a series of complementary environmental archives to evaluate the quality of the Holocene-historical faunal record of Hainan Island, China's southernmost province, for establishing new baselines on postglacial mammalian diversity and extinction dynamics.

Unexpected diversity within the extinct elephant birds (Aves: Aepyornithidae) and a new identity for the world's largest bird.

Madagascar's now-extinct radiation of large-bodied ratites, the elephant birds (Aepyornithidae), has been subject to little modern research compared to the island's mammalian megafauna and other Late Quaternary giant birds. The family's convoluted and conflicting taxonomic history has hindered accurate interpretation of morphological diversity and has restricted modern research into their evolutionary history, biogeography and ecology. We present a new quantitative analysis of patterns of morphological diversity of aepyornithid skeletal elements, including material from all major global collections of aepyornithid skeletal remains, and constituting the first taxonomic reassessment of the family for over 50 years.