A method for inferring paleohabitats from the functional morphology of bovid astragali

The functional morphology of bovid postcranial fossils can be used to infer paleoenvironments, an approach often labeled ‘ecomorphology’. Such techniques have some advantages over taxon-based methods of inferring paleoenvironments (e.g. they do not assume stasis in a lineage’s habitat preference over evolutionary time). Current methods for predicting habitat preference from bovid postcrania are restricted to femora and metapodials, whose preservation is often limited. We describe here a method for predicting paleohabitats using measurements of bovid astragali. The astragalus method correctly predicted the habitat preference for 146 of 218 modern bovid specimens (67%, 2.7 times better than chance; p<0.0001). This accuracy compares well with that of femur and metapodial methods (1.8–3.4 times better than chance). In addition, analysis of the probabilities associated with the habitat predictions allows a confidence threshold to be established that identifies specific predictions which have <5% chance of being in error. This raises the effective accuracy of the method to 95%. Extensive exploration and manipulation of the underlying data demonstrate that the habitat predictions are generally robust, and are relatively independent of body weight, taxonomy, and sample composition. The accuracy of this method and its broad applicability make it a useful addition to the existing array of techniques for inferring past environments. 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.