“…Imperative to accurate collection and application of these proxy data is an understanding of the lateral and vertical relationships between strata and time in the rock record. To address this need, chronostratigraphic models have been developed and applied to marine (Vail et al, 1977;Van Wagoner et al, 1988), lacustrine (Bohacs et al, 2000;Keighley et al, 2003), fluvial (Shanley and McCabe, 1994;Currie, 1997), deltaic (Gani and Bhattacharya, 2005) and alluvial-fan strata (DeCelles et al, 1991a;Bourquin et al, 1998;Weissmann et al, 2002). Despite the elegance and utility of these models, they have only rarely been subjected to the test of independent geochronologic analysis (e.g., Vail et al, 1977;Behrensmeyer and Tauxe, 1982;Zechun et al, 1998;Prothero, 2001).…”