Hopley, Philip J. and Maslin, Mark A. (2010) Climate-averaging of terrestrial faunas: an example from the Plio-Pleistocene of South Africa. Paleobiology 36 (1), pp. 32-50. ISSN 0094-8373.
Abstract
Fundamental to the interpretation of bone-bearing faunal deposits is an understanding of the taphonomic processes that have modified the once living fossil community. An often neglected source of bias is that of climate-averaging, which occurs when the duration of bone accumulation exceeds the duration of an individual climatic episode. Tropical and subtropical climate change is dominated by precessional cyclicity (~21,000 year cycle), which controls monsoon rainfall intensity and thus plant communities over time. Under a climate-averaging scenario, the paleoecological characteristics of a faunal deposit represent an amalgamation of more than one phase of the precessional cycle. We investigate the degree of climate-averaging in Plio-Pleistocene bone breccias from South Africa by comparing stable isotope measurements of fossil enamel with the evidence from high-resolution speleothem paleoclimate proxies. We conclude that each of the four faunal assemblages studied are climate-averaged, having formed over a time period in excess of one-third of a precessional cycle (~7000 years). This has implications for the reconstruction of hominin paleoenvironments and estimates of Plio-Pleistocene biodiversity. We hypothesize that climate-averaging may be a common feature of tropical terrestrial vertebrate assemblages throughout the Cenozoic and Mesozoic.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Natural Sciences |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 25 Feb 2011 14:15 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 16:54 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/3141 |
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