The Non-analog Vegetation of the Late Paleozoic Icehouse–Hothouse and Their Coal-Forming Forested Environments

Gastaldo, Robert A.; Bamford, Marion K.; Calder, John H.; DiMichele, William A.; Iannuzzi, Roberto; Jasper, André; Kerp, Hans; McLoughlin, Stephen; Opluštil, Stanislav; Pfefferkorn, Hermann W.; Rößler, Ronny; Wang, Jun

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-35058-1_12

Cited by 5 publications

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“…2017; Gastaldo et al . 2020). Coupled with the interplay of the Pangaea assembly, oceanic circulation, atmospheric composition and polar ice‐sheet extent, this environmental turnover generally provoked the contraction of the once widespread, peat‐forming wetlands in favour of seasonally dry habitats (Greb et al .…”

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confidence: 99%

Decoding the drivers of deep‐time wetland biodiversity: insights from an early Permian tropical lake ecosystem

et al. 2023

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Wetlands are important to continental evolution, providing both arenas and refugia for emerging and declining biotas. This significance and the high preservation potential make the resulting fossiliferous deposits essential for our understanding of past and future biodiversity. We reconstruct the trophic structure and age of the early Permian Manebach Lake ecosystem, Germany, a thriving wetland at a time when the tropical biosphere faced profound upheaval in the peaking Late Palaeozoic Icehouse. Nine excavations, high‐resolution spatiotemporal documentation of fossils and strata, and U–Pb radioisotopic dating of tuffs allow us to distinguish autogenic and allogenic factors shaping the limnic biocoenosis. The Manebach Lake was an exorheic, oxygen‐stratified, perennial water body on the 101–102 km2 scale, integrated into the catchment draining much of the European Variscides. Lake formation paralleled an Asselian regional wet climatic interval and benefited from rising base level due to post‐Variscan half‐graben tectonics. Stromatolite‐forming cyanobacteria, bivalves, several crustaceans, amblypterids and xenacanthid sharks formed a differentiated biocoenosis in the lake. Fossil stomach remains and teeth prove the rare presence of acanthodians, branchiosaurs and large amphibians. The results indicate woody‐debris‐bearing lake littorals devoid of semi‐aquatic and aquatic plants as places suitable for stromatolites to grow, underpin the model of declining freshwater‐shark diversity in most Permian Variscan basins, demonstrate fish/amphibian ratios in limnic assemblages to measure lake perenniality and reveal taphonomic biases in lake taphocoenoses. Our outcomes call for more knowledge about the diversity, ecology and fossilization pathways of past limnic biotas, particularly microorganisms and actinopterygian fishes, to reconstruct deep‐time continental ecosystems.

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Decoding the drivers of deep‐time wetland biodiversity: insights from an early Permian tropical lake ecosystem

et al. 2023

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“…Therefore these plants are often considered to have been adapted to cold climate. However, these plants commonly display large, complete, non-toothed leaves which are typical of warm-weather plants, possibly subtropical or trop-ical, and not small, toothed leaves indicative of polar/subpolar climates (Götz et al, 2018;DeVore & Pigg, 2020;Gastaldo et al, 2020aGastaldo et al, , 2020bMays et al, 2020;Tripathy et al, 2021). Plants are better climate indicators than sediments, which would undermine interpretations of former cold climates in the Late Palaeozoic.…”

Section: Fossil Vegetationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patterns, processes and models - an analytical review of current ambiguous interpretations of the evidence for pre-Pleistocene glaciations

Molén

2023

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Models (paradigms) and former interpretations have often been presupposed when conducting field research. In the 19th century diamictites were for the first time interpreted to have originated from ancient glaciations. These interpretations have to a large part prevailed in the geological community, although there has been much progress in the areas of sedimentology, glaciology and physical geography. The present work is an effort to find criteria which most clearly discriminate between geological features produced by different processes, mainly glaciation and mass flow, the latter predominantly sediment gravity flows. Geological features which have been interpreted to have formed by glaciation throughout pre-Pleistocene Earth history are compared to similar-appearing geological features formed by mass flow and tectonics, so as to uncover variations in the appearance between features resulting from these different processes. The starting point for this comparison is documentation of the appearance of Quaternary products of erosion and deposition, in order to discern the origin of older formations. It is shown that the appearance and origin of pavements, dropstones, valleys, small-scale landforms, surface microtextures and most other geological features may in some cases be equivocal, but in others the details are indicative of the process which generated the feature. Detailed geological field data which have been compiled by geologists from outcrops of pre-Pleistocene strata, more often than is considered in most papers, commonly point to a mass flow origin, mainly a sediment gravity flow origin, rather than a glaciogenic origin. A process of multiple working hypotheses or interpretations is therefore advocated, based mainly on a comparison of the appearance of features formed by different geological processes documented from different research disciplines. Instead of starting with current interpretations or models, this multiple working hypothesis or methodology helps to avoid confirmation bias and jumping to conclusions.

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Glaciation-induced features or sediment gravity flows – An analytic review

Molén

2023

Journal of Palaeogeography

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The Non-analog Vegetation of the Late Paleozoic Icehouse–Hothouse and Their Coal-Forming Forested Environments

Cited by 5 publications

References 66 publications

Decoding the drivers of deep‐time wetland biodiversity: insights from an early Permian tropical lake ecosystem

Decoding the drivers of deep‐time wetland biodiversity: insights from an early Permian tropical lake ecosystem

Patterns, processes and models - an analytical review of current ambiguous interpretations of the evidence for pre-Pleistocene glaciations

Glaciation-induced features or sediment gravity flows – An analytic review

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