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Sex in the city: uncovering sex-specific management of equine resources from prehistoric times to the modern period in France
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Sex identification from fragmentary archeozoological assemblages is particularly challenging in the Equid family, including for horses, donkeys and their hybrids. This limitation has precluded in-depth investigations of sex-ratio variation in various temporal, geographic and social contexts. Recently, shallow DNA sequencing has offered an economical solution to equine sex determination, even in environments where DNA preservation conditions is not optimal. In this study, we applied state-of-the-art methods in ancient DNA-based equine sex determination to 897 osseous remains in order to assess whether equal proportions of males and females could be found in a range of archeological contexts in France. We found Magdalenian horse hunt not focused on isolated bachelors, and Upper Paleolithic habitats and natural traps equally balancing sex ratios. In contrast, Iron Age sacrificial rituals appeared to have been preferentially oriented to male horses and this practice extended into the Roman Period. During Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Modern Period, cities emerged as environments largely dominated by horse males. This strong sex-bias was considerably reduced, and sometimes even absent, in various rural contexts. Combined with previous archaeozoological work and textual evidence, our results portray an urban economy fueled by adult, often old, males, and rural environments where females and subadults of both sexes were maintained to sustain production demands.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2022
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Historical management of equine resources in France from the Iron Age to the Modern Period
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Alongside horses, donkeys and their first-generation hybrids represent members of the Equidae family known for their social, economic and symbolic importance in protohistoric and historical France. However, their relative importance and their respective roles in different regions and time periods are difficult to assess based on textual, iconographic and archaeological evidence. This is both due to incomplete, partial and scattered historical sources and difficulties to accurately assign fragmentary archaeological remains at the proper taxonomic level. DNA- based methods, however, allow for a robust identification of the taxonomic status of ancient equine osseous material from minimal sequence data. Here, we leveraged shallow ancient DNA sequencing and the dedicated Zonkey computational pipeline to obtain the first baseline distribution for horses, mules and donkeys in France from the Iron Age to the Modern period. Our collection includes a total of 873 ancient specimens spanning 128 ubiquitous and the most dominant species identified, our dataset reveals the importance of mule breeding during Roman times, especially between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE (Common Era), where they represented between 20.0% and 34.2% of equine assemblages. In contrast, donkeys were almost absent from northern France as-semblages during the whole Roman period, but replaced mules in rural and urban commercial and economic centers from the early Middle Ages. Our work also identified donkeys of exceptional size during Late Antiquity, which calls for a deep reassessment of the true morphological space of past equine species. This study confirmed the general preference toward horses throughout all time periods investigated but revealed dynamic manage-ment strategies leveraging the whole breadth of equine resources in various social, geographic and temporal contexts.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2021
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Sphaeroptica: A tool for pseudo-3D visualization and 3D measurements on arthropods
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Natural history collections are invaluable reference collections. Digitizing these collections is a transformative process that improves the accessibility, preservation, and exploitation of specimens and associated data in the long term. Arthropods make up the majority of zoological collections. However, arthropods are small, have detailed color textures and share small, complex and shiny structures, which poses a challenge to conventional digitization methods. Sphaeroptica is a multi-images viewer that uses a sphere of oriented images. It allows the visualization of insects including their tiniest features, the positioning of landmarks, and the extraction of 3D coordinates for measuring linear distances or for use in geometric morphometrics analysis. The quantitative comparisons show that the measures obtained with Sphaeroptica are similar to the measurements derived from 3D μCT models with an average difference inferior to 1\%, while featuring the high resolution of color stacked pictures with all details like setae, chaetae, scales, and other small and/or complex structures. Shaeroptica was developed for the digitization of small arthropods but it can be used with any sphere of aligned images resulting from the digitization of objects or specimens with complex surface and shining, black, or translucent texture which cannot easily be digitized using structured light scanner or Structure-from-Motion (SfM) photogrammetry.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2024 OA
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Icaphoca choristodon n. gen., n. sp., a new monachine seal (Carnivora, Mammalia) from the Neogene of Peru
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Icaphoca choristodon n. gen., n. sp., described in the present study, represents the sixth monachine seal from the Neogene Pisco Formation of Peru. The species is solely known from the holotype, including a cranium with both mandibles, as well as five cervical vertebrae including the atlas and axis. This holotype was collected at the Cerro La Bruja locality, the type locality of Magophoca brevirostris, in the Ica Desert after which Icaphoca has been named. Stratigraphically, the holotype was recovered from strata underlying those of the Cerro La Bruja level (CLB level), from which Magophoca was recovered. These beds likely correspond with the P1-2 unit of the P1 sequence within the Pisco Formation. Assumed to be as old as 9 Ma (middle Tortonian), Icaphoca may be the oldest described monachine seal from the southeast Pacific. Following Magophoca and Noriphoca, Icaphoca is the third extinct monachine seal known to have six upper incisors. This plesiomorphic character is absent in all other extant and extinct Monachinae which have only four upper incisors. The elongation of the snout, as well as the presence of profound diastemas between the postcanine teeth, suggests that Icaphoca is closely related to Acrophoca from the upper Tortonian and Messinian of the Pisco Formation in the Sacaco area (Arequipa Department), c. 200 km southeast to Cerro La Bruja. The specific name choristodon refers to this spacing between the post-canine teeth. The close phylogenetic relationship between Icaphoca and Acrophoca is confirmed by the phylogenetic analysis, which retrieves both genera as sister taxa.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2025
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Towards an integrative revision of Haplotaxidae (Annelida: Clitellata)
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RBINS Staff Publications 2024
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Revision of a unique Australian leafhopper genus Stenopsoides Evans (Hemiptera: Cicadellidae: Idiocerinae: Macropsini)
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RBINS Staff Publications 2021
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Oceanographic and Marine Cross-Domain Data Management for Sustainable Development
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RBINS Staff Publications 2016
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Repositioning data management near data acquisition
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RBINS Staff Publications 2016
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Fifteen species in one: deciphering the Brachionus plicatilis species complex (Rotifera, Monogononta) through DNA taxonomy
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RBINS Staff Publications 2016
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The influence of environmental variables on freshwater rotifers of the family Brachionidae and Lecanidae in Thailand
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RBINS Staff Publications 2017
