Lower Carboniferous Echinoderms From Northern Utah And Western Wyoming

An abundance of crinoid ossicles was noted in the early reports of Lower Carboniferous strata of northern Utah and southeastern Idaho. Articulated crinoid cups and crowns, however, were not reported. Collections of the past 50 years and especially the past 15 years have found significant numbers of well-preserved crinoid cups and crowns along with a few echinoids, blastoids, and asterozoans in the Gardison Limestone of the Wasatch Range, Henderson Canyon Formation of the Bear River Range, Wellsville Mountain, and northern parts of the Wasatch Range of northern Utah, as well as in the Lodgepole Limestone of western Wyoming. The purposes of this paper are to describe the crinoids, blastoid, and echinoids from northern Utah and western Wyoming, discuss their relationship to previously described faunas from North America and Europe, and relate their stratigraphic occurrences to conodont zonations and their geographic occurrence to recent interpretations of the regional carbonate facies and tectonic setting.

This volume focuses on the broad pattern of increasing biodiversity through time, and recurrent events of minor and major ecosphere reorganization. Intense scrutiny is devoted to the pattern of physical (including isotopic), sedimentary and biotic circumstances through the time intervals during which life crises occurred. These events affected terrestrial, lacustrine and estuarine ecosystems, locally and globally, but have affected continental shelf ecosystems and even deep ocean ecosystems. The pattern of these events is the backdrop against which modelling the pattern of future environmental change needs to be evaluated.

The dominant faunal elements in shallow Paleozoic oceans, echinoderms are important to understanding these marine ecosystems. Echinoderms (which include such animals as sea stars, crinoids or sea lilies, sea urchins, sand dollars, and sea cucumbers) have left a rich and, for science, extremely useful fossil record. For various reasons, they provide the ideal source for answers to the questions that will help us develop a more complete understanding of global environmental and biodiversity changes. This volume highlights the modern study of fossil echinoderms and is organized into five parts: echinoderm paleoecology, functional morphology, and paleoecology; evolutionary paleoecology; morphology for refined phylogenetic studies; innovative applications of data encoded in echinoderms; and information on new crinoid data sets.

The print edition is published as 2 hardback volumes, parts A and B, and sold as a set. The Carboniferous was the time of the assembly of Pangaea by the collision of the Gondwanan and Larussian supercontinents, and the principal interval of the late Paleozoic ice ages. These tectonic and climatic events caused dramatic sea-level fluctuations and climate changes and produced a Carboniferous world that was diverse topographically and climatologically, perhaps only rivalled in that diversity by the late Cenozoic world. Furthermore, the Carboniferous was a time of the accumulation of vast coal deposits of great economic and societal significance. The temporal ordering of geological and biotic events during Carboniferous time thus is critical to the interpretation of some unique and pivotal events in Earth history. This temporal ordering is based on the Carboniferous timescale, which has been developed and refined for nearly two centuries. This book reviews the history of the development of the Carboniferous chronostratigraphic scale and includes comprehensive analyses of Carboniferous radioisotopic ages, magnetostratigraphy, isotope-based correlations, cyclostratigraphy and timescale-relevant marine and non-marine biostratigraphy and biochronology.

One of the most important functions of paleontology in the earth sciences is time correlation of rock strata using taxonomic analysis of fossils in different regions. Comparisons of certain species’ similarities between regions frequently allows for precise age dating and correlation of strata limited only by the presence/absence of species and the speed at which they evolved. Between their first appearance in the early/middle Devonian and their ultimate extinction at the K-T boundary, no other single taxonomic group is as precise or as widely useful for time correlation of strata as the ammonoid cephalopods, an extinct distant relative of the modern chambered nautilus. This is especially true for the Carboniferous Era, where ammonoid change was extremely rapid for reasons that are as yet not fully known, although global climate fluctuation is probably a key driving force.

The rapid evolution of terrestrial ecosystems in the Devonian Period combined with climate change and many global events had a pronounced influence on sedimentation and biodiversity in various terrestrial and marine settings. This volume presents a number of case studies which cover the following topics land-sea transitional settings, the role of ecological-evolutionary subunits, the diversity and palaeoecology of reef building organisms and microfloras with respect to sedimentary processes and global events.

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