Search results for " Life."
showing 10 items of 18359 documents
Pre-Hirnantian (latest Ordovician) benthic community assemblages: controls and replacements in a siliciclastic-dominated platform of the eastern Anti…
2007
17 pages; International audience; Lower-middle Ashgill sedimentary strata from the Mediterranean region have recorded a key episode of temperate-to-cold water, carbonate productivity predating the onset of the Hirnantian glaciation. The latitudinal position of the Moroccan margin of North Gondwana during Ashgill should have been adequate for the recorded development of carbonate factories. However, carbonate productivity was neither homogeneous nor laterally persistent, as documented in the eastern Anti-Atlas. Whereas in the Erfoud area, the bryozoan-dominated limestones of the Ashgill Khabt-el-Hajar Formation indicate the intensive activity of carbonate factories, these were dramatically r…
Last Interglacial Iberian Neandertals as fisher-hunter-gatherers.
2020
Fruits of the sea The origins of marine resource consumption by humans have been much debated. Zilhão et al. present evidence that, in Atlantic Iberia's coastal settings, Middle Paleolithic Neanderthals exploited marine resources at a scale on par with the modern human–associated Middle Stone Age of southern Africa (see the Perspective by Will). Excavations at the Figueira Brava site on Portugal's Atlantic coast reveal shell middens rich in the remains of mollusks, crabs, and fish, as well as terrestrial food items. Familiarity with the sea and its resources may thus have been widespread for residents there in the Middle Paleolithic. The Figueira Brava Neanderthals also exploited stone pine…
The end of the Messinian salinity crisis: Evidences from the Chelif Basin (Algeria).
2007
How did the Messinian Salinity Crisis end is a matter of intense debate between two opposite concepts i.e., the generalised dilution event, the so-called Lago–Mare, followed by the sudden restoration of the marine conditions at the base of the Zanclean, or the early partial or complete marine refill that would have happened earlier during the upper Messinian. The Chelif Basin of Northwestern Algeria, one of the greatest Messinian marginal basins of the Mediterranean, provides an exceptional opportunity to study in detail how this major paleoenvironmental change occurred through continuous sedimentary records of the Miocene–Pliocene boundary. Five sections representative of both the central …
Smithian shoreline migrations and depositional settings in Timpoweap Canyon (Early Triassic, Utah, USA).
2014
AbstractIn Timpoweap Canyon near Hurricane (Utah, USA), spectacular outcrop conditions of Early Triassic rocks document the geometric relationships between a massive Smithian fenestral-microbial unit and underlying, lateral and overlying sedimentary units. This allows us to reconstruct the evolution of depositional environments and high-frequency relative sea-level fluctuations in the studied area. Depositional environments evolved from a coastal plain with continental deposits to peritidal settings with fenestral-microbial limestones, which are overlain by intertidal to shallow subtidal marine bioclastic limestones. This transgressive trend of a large-scale depositional sequence marks a lo…
Climatic fluctuations and seasonality during the Late Jurassic (Oxfordian–Early Kimmeridgian) inferred from delta18O of Paris Basin oyster shells.
2008
10 pages; International audience; Oxygen isotope data from biostratigraphically well-dated oyster shells from the Late Jurassic of the eastern Paris Basin are used to reconstruct the thermal evolution of western Tethyan surface waters during the Early Oxfordian–Early Kimmeridgian interval. Seventy eight oyster shells were carefully screened for potential diagenetic alteration using cathodoluminescence microscopy. Isotope analyses were performed on nonluminescent parts of shells (n=264). Intra-shell δ18O variability was estimated by microsampling along a transect perpendicular to the growth lines of the largest oyster shell. The sinusoidal distribution of the δ18O values along this transect …
Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia
2013
Past global climate changes had strong regional expression. To elucidate their spatio-temporal pattern, we reconstructed past temperatures for seven continental-scale regions during the past one to two millennia. The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century. At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructi…
Middle Triassic sharks from the Catalan Coastal ranges (NE Spain) and faunal colonization patterns during the westward transgression of Tethys
2020
Abstract Palaeogeographic changes that occurred during the Middle Triassic in the westernmost Tethyan domain were governed by a westward marine transgression of the Tethys Ocean. The transgression flooded wide areas of the eastern part of Iberia, forming new epicontinental shallow-marine environments, which were subsequently colonized by diverse faunas, including chondrichthyans. The transgression is recorded by two successive transgressive–regressive cycles: (1) middle–late Anisian and (2) late Anisian–early Carnian. Here, we describe the chondrichthyan fauna recovered from several Middle Triassic stratigraphic sections (Pelsonian-Longobardian) located at the Catalan Coastal Basin (western…
Palynofacies and calcareous nannofossils in the Upper Kimmeridgian, southeastern Paris basin (France)
2005
AbstractThe Upper Kimmeridgian Members “Calcaires blancs supérieurs” and the “Marnes à exogyres supérieures” of the southeastern Paris basin were investigated for their palynofacies and calcareous nannofossils. These members display alternating limestone-marl lithotypes and represent shallow marine palaeoenvironments. The lower carbonate member is interpreted as a proximal palaeoenvironment (palaeobathymetry = 5 to 10 m), where storm and swell deposits were prevalent and the salinity was occasionally weak. The relative richness of brown phytoclasts in this part is favoured by good preservation related to restricted conditions. These conditions would explain the dominance of the nannofoss…
Unravelling extrinsic and intrinsic factors of the early Palaeozoic diversification of blastozoan echinoderms
2010
19 pages; International audience; The Subphylum Blastozoa represents more than one third of the early Palaeozoic echinoderm fauna. A comprehensive database including all records of blastozoans was built to provide quantitative analyses of palaeogeography and diversity patterns and processes, for the 10 classes currently included in this subphylum during the early Palaeozoic. The global pattern of taxonomic diversity shows two peaks during the Cambrian Series 3 and the Late Ordovician intervals. In Cambrian times, the high taxonomic diversity seems to be related with a high turnover rate and a high endemicity of blastozoan genera, whereas in Ordovician times, the rise in diversity is associa…
First report of Gogia (Eocrinoidea, Echinodermata) from the Early-Middle Cambrian of Sonora (Mexico), with biostratigraphical and palaeoecological co…
2009
10 pages; International audience; The blastozoan echinoderm genus Gogia is reported for the first time in the Early and the Middle Cambrian of Mexico. Reports in different members of the section of San José de Gracia (Sonora State, northwestern Mexico) extend the palaeogeographical range of the genus to the South Laurentia, and the stratigraphic range of Gogia granulosa to the whole first half of middle Middle Cambrian. Isolated plates occur in rocks deposited in detrital inner platform and complete specimens, in carbonate outer platform, confirming their ability to live in diverse environments. Their presence in these different environments through the Early-Middle Cambrian on Laurentia ag…