At the southern fringe: extant and fossil water voles of the genus Arvicola (Rodentia, Cricetidae, Arvicolinae) from Israel, with the description of a new species

ABSTRACT

The (palaeo)biogeography of water voles is a puzzle that is not solved in detail yet. Extant species of the genus Arvicola cover a vast geographic area of the Palearctic. In this study, we collected morphometric data of extant and fossil Arvicola from Israel at the southern fringe of the water vole distribution area. The dental evolution of water voles is characterised by certain clear trends in the first lower molar (m1) related to crown height, tooth length, the proportion of the anteroconid-complex, and enamel differentiation. Trans-regional correlation of the latter trend shows that it did not develop completely synchronously in all the geographic areas of water voles’ distribution, i.e., not at the same evolutionary rate. Based on the size and geographic distribution, we tentatively consider the Israeli material to belong to an A. persicus group, which facilitates the possibility of future taxonomic subdivision. Among the Israeli material, Late Pleistocene remains from Nahal Mahanayeem Outlet (NMO) show a very particular morphology of the first lower molar compared to samples from other localities in Israel and western Asia, which – in our opinion – justifies the establishment of a new species Arvicola nahalensis n. sp.

KEYWORDS:

• southern Levant
• Arvicola
• taxonomy
• palaeoecology
• biogeography
• biostratigraphy

Acknowledgments

We thank F. Valla (Université de Paris Nanterre), and G. Sharon (Tel Hai College, Upper Galilee), for the access to the archaeological material from Eynan and NMO, respectively. We thank Y. Yom-Tov in the National Collections of Natural History at Tel Aviv University (TAU) for access of data of extant Arvicola specimens. We are also grateful to G. Storch (†) (Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg, Frankfurt/M.), C. Sesé (Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Madrid), and M. Cagnin (Università della Calabria) for access and use of data of extant Arvicola samples from western Asia, Spain, and northern Italy, C. Funk (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin) for permitting photographs of the type specimens of Arvicola amphibius hintoni Aharoni, 1932, A. Haim (HUJ Jerusalem) for producing maps (Figure 1, 2, 14), F. Masini (Palermo), and B. Kryštufek (Ljubljana) for fruitful discussion. We also thank the three anonymous reviewers who provided valuable comments. Last but not least we are grateful to E. Lachman (HUJ Jerusalem) for improving the English and for her valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.