“…In light of this relationship, the results indicate that exceptional preservation occurs within non-marine settings in response to local and provincial conditions, largely immune to global secular environmental changes. As non-marine assemblages occur in clusters throughout the middle Devonian-Neogene interval (Bradley, 1964;Huber and McDonald, 2003;Trewin, 1985;Trewin and Davidson, 1995;Wang et al, 2012), these phenomena must include regional scale factors, like topography, sedimentation rate, climate, primary productivity, salinity, and paleogeography (Allison and Briggs, 1993). In general, exceptional preservation may be favored in regional settings with bottom water stagnation, episodic burial, pore water anoxia, and early-diagenetic sealing of sediments in addition to low levels of animal scavenging, bioturbation, and sediment reworking (Allison and Briggs, 1991;Seilacher et al, 1985).…”