Establishing body mass from skeletal remains of an animal is of importance to researchers in the fields of ecology, palaeontology and archaeozoology. Establishing such standards requires that different body parts follow allometric growth curves, and that one can access a sufficiently large sample of individuals of known size and weight for the target species. Here, we have used data collected from modern living and dead leopard tortoises Stigmochelys pardalis (Bell, 1928), to reconstruct body size and mass from measurements taken on individual postcranial bones. The results show high correlations in both mass and size for various dimensions taken on most skeletal elements, enabling reconstruction of these parameters from individual skeletal measurements. To highlight the application of such data to fossil fauna, allometric equations derived from regression analyses of the modern animals were applied to a sample of Later Stone Age (ca. 10,000 BP to present) leopard tortoise remains from Wonderwerk Cave located in the central interior of South Africa. Results for this archaeological sample show significant changes in size and body mass over time. These best correlate with shifts in paleoenvironmental conditions rather than with anthropogenic pressures that have commonly been implicated in size reduction or biased sex ratios in tortoise populations.

从动物的骨骼遗骸中确定体重对于生态学、古生物学和考古动物学领域的研究人员来说非常重要。建立这样的标准需要不同的身体部位遵循异速生长曲线，并且可以获取足够大的目标物种已知大小和重量的个体样本。在这里，我们使用了从现代生活和死亡豹龟Stigmochelys pardalis收集的数据(Bell, 1928)，根据对单个颅后骨骼的测量来重建身体的大小和质量。结果显示，大多数骨骼元件的各种尺寸的质量和尺寸都具有高度相关性，从而能够从单个骨骼测量值中重建这些参数。为了强调这些数据在化石动物群中的应用，从现代动物的回归分析中得出的异速生长方程被应用于石器时代晚期（约 10,000 BP 至今）来自位于中央内部的 Wonderwerk Cave 的豹龟遗骸样本。南非。该考古样本的结果显示，随着时间的推移，大小和体重发生了显着变化。