Multi-Taxa Neo-Taphonomic Analysis of Bone Remains from Barn Owl Pellets and Cross-Validation of Observations: A Case Study from Dominica (Lesser Antilles)

Palaeo- and neo-taphonomic analyses of bone assemblages rarely consider all the occurring taxa in a single study, and works concerning birds of prey as accumulators of microvertebrate bone remains mostly focus on small mammals such as rodents and soricomorphs. However, raptors often hunt and consume a large range of taxa, including, among vertebrates, small mammals but also fishes, amphibians, squamates and birds. Bone remains of all these taxonomic groups are numerous in many palaeontological and archaeological records, especially in cave deposits. To better characterize the predators at the origin of fossil and sub-fossil microvertebrate accumulations and the taphonomic history of the deposit, it is thus mandatory to conduct global and multi-taxa taphonomic approaches. The aim of this study is to provide an example of such a global approach through the investigation of a modern bone assemblage from a sample of pellets produced by the Lesser Antillean Barn Owl (Tyto insularis) in the island of Dominica. We propose a new me-thodology that allows us to compare different taxa (rodents, bats, squamates and birds) and to experiment with a cross-validation process using two observers for each taxonomic group to test the reliability of the taphonomic observations.