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RESEARCH PRODUCT

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

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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 it is nowadays. Indeed, while a small number of extinction or extirpation events can be related to the Pleistocene-Holocene climatic transition, the faunal community of the island is nearly completely modified during the last millenaries. These modifications include the arrival of several exogenous taxa, and an extinction/extirpation rate of native species between 54% and 100% depending of taxa.Our results suggest that human impact was the main factor driving the evolution of the island terrestrial faunal diversity. We also demonstrate a possible impact of Pre-Columbian human populations on the faunal diversity of Marie-Galante Island which however remains minor in respect to the overwhelming modifications possibly related to the European colonization and subsequent anthropization of the island.