Can mesowear analysis be applied to small mammals? A pilot-study on leporines and murines

In recent years, various methods have been developed to infer from mammal tooth wear patterns the abrasiveness of the food they consumed, which reflects the amount of dust in their habitat and thus the environment they inhabit. One of these methods is mesowear analysis, which is applied particularly to fossils in order to reconstruct palaeoenvironment, but increasingly also to species protection management of recent animals. In numerous studies this method has been applied to the teeth of large herbivorous mammals. Despite the well-known importance of small mammal fossils, which occur in great numbers in countless Cenozoic sites giving a large sample size and provide significant palaeontological data, mesowear analysis has not yet been applied to this group. In the present work, teeth of various hare and mice species (Leporinae and Murinae) are subjected to a mesowear analysis for the first time. We aim to test the applicability of the method in these groups. Our results clearly indicate that significant mesowear signals are evident in Leporinae as well as Murinae, reflecting known habitat conditions of the species. Furthermore, problems and limitations of the application of the mesowear methods on small mammal teeth are discussed.