Preface: mesozoic marine biota from western Gondwana: evolution and palaeobiogeography
✍ Scribed by Beatriz Aguirre-Urreta; Zulma Gasparini
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2007
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 59 KB
- Volume
- 42
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0072-1050
- DOI
- 10.1002/gj.1078
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Eleven symposia were organized within the framework of the meeting, which covered a wide range of specialist fields in Geosciences. The oral plus the poster presentations amounted to 340 contributions (Pankhurst and Veiga 2005). One of the symposia (S9) was devoted to the 'Mesozoic marine biota: evolution and palaeobiogeography' with 10 abstracts. This SI stems from this symposium and contains six selected papers dealing with this subject.
Most of the contributions in this SI deal with the marine biota from Patagonia, especially from the Neuque ´n Basin, famous in the Southern Hemisphere for its extensive outcrops and very well-preserved fossils. The classic marine faunas of this basin, spanning from the Late Triassic to the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary are the Gondwanic reference not only for phylogenetic investigations but also for biostratigraphic and palaeobiogeographic studies. Thus, both the specific and the more extended and broad papers included here are substantial contributions that shed light on the understanding of the biota of the southern continents.
The contributions to this SI are focussed mainly in the Cretaceous. Three of these studies are devoted to molluscs. Peter Rawson analyses the global relationships of Early Cretaceous ammonite faunas and proposes that links between the Northwestern European and other South American faunas suggest a possible direct marine connection between the two areas.