Evolution of the terrestrial vertebrate diversity of Marie-Galante Island (French West-Indies) during the last 40 000 years

International audience; Marie-Galante Island (Guadeloupe, French West-Indies) has recently been the object of several paleontological investigations in order to characterize the evolution of its terrestrial vertebrate paleobiodiversity during the last 40 000 years. This paper consists in a synthesis these recently obtained results obtained by crossed studies of several large vertebrate fossil assemblages (mammal, bird, squamate, and amphibian) collected in Late Pleistocene and Holocene deposits. Our work reveals apreviously inconspicuous now-extinct Pleistocene and Holocene vertebrate biodiversity. We observed that this past diversity was recently modified to become very different from what…