Taphonomy of vertabrate microfossil assemblages in coastal environments : In search of a modern analogous model
Abstract
Coastal environments, located halfway between continental and marine realms, are peculiar settings that concentrate and preserve diverse assemblages of mixed autochthonous and allochthonous organisms (Fig. 1). Vertebrate microfossil assemblages are regularly described from Cretaceous coastal deposits, but taphonomic and stratinomic processes involved in the formation of such accumulations often remain unclear. Actuotaphonomic studies dealing with the composition, distribution, and preservation of a specific group (i.e., ecological fidelity) within a modern coastal thanatocoenosis mainly concern such invertebrates as mollusks (Bosence, 1979; Cumins et al., 1986; Henderson and Frey, 1986; Kidwell, 2008) and echinoderms (Greenstein, 1989). For vertebrates, burial experiments have been conducted using large carcasses of marine turtles (Meyer, 1991), but actuotaphonomic analyses have never been performed on microremains.