By: Andy Flick, Evolutionary Studies senior program manager
The food we eat influences the wear patterns on our teeth. Dentists will tell you about the effects of acidic coffee or soda, hard candies, and popcorn kernels. Paleoecologists will tell you about the effects of grass versus branches. In a new study led by graduate student Katharine Walls of the DeSantis DREAM Lab, the team found that the tooth-wear patterns of springbok can vary based on the type of environment they live in. The study, titled “One species, many signals: Interpreting dental microwear textures and mesowear in mixed-feeding springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis) across biomes in modern and Pleistocene systems” was published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, and included associate professor of Biological Sciences Larisa DeSantis and undergraduate alum of the lab Solathus Johnson (BA ‘24).
“We were interested in studying species with high dietary plasticity,” Walls said, “and springboks are a perfect example of that. We felt that mixed-feeding species had really been overlooked as a potential source of paleoecological data. Their dietary plasticity does introduce more uncertainty in some ways, but it also means these species can tell you a lot about what plant resources are on the landscape, because they are capable of utilizing many of them, and we can track their dietary preferences through tools like dental microwear texture analysis.”
Understanding what animals eat today by comparing their known dietary habits with their dental microwear patterns helps paleoecologists study what animals ate thousands or even millions of years ago. Walls explained that living animals often have known diets, so analyzing their teeth can reveal the broad patterns caused by specific types of foods and environments.
To test the differences in tooth-wear patterns, the team collected data from springbok teeth from a wide range of habitats by working with specimens from South Africa and the American Museum of Natural History. The group looked at microwear, reflecting foods eaten during the final days to weeks of an animal’s life, and mesowear, which reflects months to years of diet.
The paper shows that springbok from different environments had distinct dental-wear patterns, with grassland animals exhibiting signals consistent with more grazing and fynbos (a shrubland ecosystem) animals showing greater browsing, while savanna springbok displayed particularly high variability. The fossil springbok showed microwear most consistent with browsers and frugivores and were more similar to modern fynbos springbok than those living in grasslands. These findings suggest that mixed-feeding species can provide valuable information about past environments, while also demonstrating that researchers need to account for geographic and environmental variation when using modern animals as comparisons for fossils.
“We included several fossil springbok specimens in this study, and we found that they seemed to have a similar diet to modern springbok that live in the same area today (the modern-day fynbos biome),” Walls concluded. “This was really interesting to us, as these fossil sites are commonly interpreted as very different from the local environment today. However, the springbok data suggest that prior reconstructions of these paleo-environments as grass-dominated may need to be reconsidered.”
Citation: Walls, K., Stynder, D., Faith, J.T., Johnson, S., Braun, D.R., O’Brien, K. and DeSantis, L.R., 2026. One species, many signals: Interpreting dental microwear textures and mesowear in mixed-feeding springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis) across biomes in modern and Pleistocene systems. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, p.114029.
Funding Statement: Funding was provided by the Evolutionary Studies Initiative at Vanderbilt University and the National Science Foundation (grant 1826666).