African savanna elephants and their vegetation associations in the Cape Region, South Africa: Opal phytoliths from dental calculus on prehistoric, historic and reserve elephants

The results show that: (1) the phytolith assemblages in dental calculus of park elephants show little variation among individual specimens and close resemblance to phytolith assemblages of soils inside their areas of confinement; (2) the free-roaming specimens have a much higher diversity of phytolith morphotypes than those in parks and reserves, exhibiting sometimes typical signatures of more than one biome; (3) free-roaming Cape elephants from fynbos areas have significant amounts of Restionaceae phytoliths, which suggests that grazing on restios in grass-poor fynbos types was important; (4) short saddles, typical of Chloridoideae grasses, are always the most abundant short-cell morphotypes in dental samples, even in areas where other grass subfamilies dominate, and (5) with some limitations, the study of phytoliths in herbivore dental calculus has a high, largely unexplored, potential in paleoecology and conservation ecology.