Episode 394 The Mangrullo Formation of Uruguay

Today we’re going back about 280 million years, to what is now Uruguay in South America.

280 million years ago puts us in the early part of the Permian Period. Gondwana, the huge southern continent, was in the process of colliding with North America and Eurasia to form the supercontinent of Pangaea. South America, Africa, Antarctica, India, and Australia had all been attached to each other in Gondwana for several hundred million years, and the extensive glaciers that occupied parts of all those continents were probably still present in at least in highlands in southern South America and South Africa, as well as Antarctica.

But the area that is now in Uruguay was probably in cool, temperate latitudes, something like New Zealand or Seattle today. The connection between southern South America and South Africa was a lowland, partially covered by a shallow arm of the sea or perhaps a broad, brackish lagoon at the estuary of a major river system that was likely fed in part by glacial meltwater from adjacent mountains. We know the water was shallow because the rocks preserve ripple marks produced by wave action or currents.

The basin must have been near the shore because delicate fossils such as insect wings and plants are among the remnants. It looks like this shallow sea or lagoon became cut off from the ocean, allowing the waters to become both more salty, even hypersaline, and anoxic, as the separation restricted inflows of water, either fresh or marine, that could have continued to oxygenate the basin. In the absence of oxygen, excellent preservation of materials that fell to the basin floor began, and there were few or no scavenging animals to disrupt the bodies.

The rocks of the Mangrullo Formation, as it’s called today, include limestones and siltstones, but the most important for fossil preservation are probably the extremely fine-grained claystones and oil shales. These rocks contain some of the best preserved fossil mesosaurs known anywhere. That’s mesosaurs, not the perhaps more well-known mosasaurs, which are large whale-like marine reptiles that lived during Cretaceous time. Here, we’re in the Permian, well before the first dinosaurs.

Mesosaur by Nobu Tamura (Creative Commons license & source) 

Mesosaurs were aquatic reptiles, and they are the earliest known. They evolved from land reptiles and were among the first to return to the water to adopt an aquatic or amphibious lifestyle. They were once thought to be part of a sister group to reptiles, a separate branch of amniotes, which are animals that lay their eggs on land or bear them inside the mother, like most mammals do. In that scheme, mesosaurs and reptiles would have diverged from a common, earlier ancestor. But more recent studies categorize them as reptiles that split off from the main genetic stem early in the history of the class, so they’re pretty distant cousins to dinosaurs and all modern reptiles, but they’re still reptiles. There is ongoing debate among evolutionary paleontologists as to exactly where mesosaurs fit.

The fossils in Uruguay are so well preserved that we can identify the gut materials of mesosaurs, and we know they mostly ate crustaceans, aquatic invertebrates related to crabs, shrimp, and lobsters. The preservation is so exceptional that in some cases, soft body parts are preserved including major nerves and blood vessels in mesosaurs and stomachs and external appendages in the crustaceans. The earliest known amniote embryos also come from these fossil beds.

Mesosaurs had a short run in terms of their geologic history, only about 30 million years. They were extinct about 270 million years ago, well before the great extinction event at the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago. But the presence of coastal-dwelling mesosaurs in both South America and Africa was a contributing idea in the early development of the theory of continental drift, since it was presumed that they could not have crossed the Atlantic Ocean as it is today.

—Richard I. Gibson

Links:

Piñeiro et al. 2012 Environmental conditions 

Paleogeography from Ron Blakey 

Episode 382 The Riversleigh Lagerstätte

Today’s Episode takes us to Australia, the home of the Riversleigh Lagerstätte. Lagerstätten, you may recall, are fossil assemblages that typically have extraordinary diversity as well as extraordinary preservation. The Riversleigh Lagerstätte fits that definition well, containing fossils of 15- to 25-million-year-old mammals, including an extinct giant platypus, as well as birds, reptiles, frogs, and lungfish. But the story begins about 500 million years ago, not 25 million years ago.

In Early to Middle Cambrian time, more than half a billion years ago, the supercontinent of Gondwana was pretty much assembled, with South America, Africa, India, Antarctica, and Australia comprising a wide, long continent that stretched from the South Pole to north of the Equator. The prong of the continent including Australia was the part that was in the tropics, and much of what is now northern Australia was covered by a warm, shallow sea.

In what is now northwestern Queensland, where the Riversleigh Lagerstätte is found, the shallow sea transgressed and regressed – meaning it came and went – and among other things, sediments included grainy shallow-water limestones. The resulting Thorntonia Limestone contains fossils that I’m sure are interesting and informative, including trilobites, brachiopods, and stromatolites, pretty typical of Cambrian rocks. But that’s not the lagerstätte.

Nimbadon, a koala-like tree-dweller. From Wikipedia.

Fast forward about 475 million years, to the Oligocene epoch of the Paleogene Period of the Cenozoic Era. The rocks of northern Queensland were dissolving in a warm, wet, tropical environment, and the limestones of the Thorntonia formation were developing karst topography – caves and surficial pools rich in dissolved calcium carbonate. Starting about 25 million years ago, near the end of the Oligocene, animals began to die in those pools and become trapped in the caves, where ongoing calcium carbonate deposition preserved them remarkably well. So even though the origin of the calcium carbonate was a really ancient rock, the Cambrian Thorntonia formation, it was the much more recent dissolution of those rocks that provided the material that preserved the fossils at Riversleigh. Ages of the fossils extend from late Oligocene time into Miocene, around 15 million years ago, but there are younger fossils as well since the caves are still there and deposition is continuing.  

The Riversleigh site is not just one location, but many, spread out over a hundred-square-kilometer area that was named a World Heritage Site in 1994.

Riversleigh contains the richest assemblage of bat fossils in the world – at least 35 different species. Besides bats, mammal fossils include extinct koalas, marsupial lions, wombats, herbivores the size of sheep, at least 14 species of opossum, and 15 different kangaroo species. While many fossils are remarkably well preserved, some, such as Yalkaparidon, are only known from a few teeth and scattered bones, making their relationships to other families uncertain. In fact, some are grouped colloquially as Thingodonta, meaning “toothed thing”. Some researchers have suggested Yalkaparidon was a mammalian woodpecker.

Bird fossils at Riversleigh range from extinct flightless rails to storks and lyrebirds. Reptiles are represented by tree-dwelling crocodiles, horned turtles, and dragon lizards, which were probably related to iguanas. There are even snakes and frogs and two species of lungfish, all of which are really rare in the fossil record, especially as long ago as the Riversleigh assemblage, 15 to 25 million years.

Some lagerstätten record essentially an instant in geologic time, or a relatively short period. An example of such an assemblage is the fish of the Green River Formation in Wyoming, many of which may have been killed in a single event – a heavy fall of ash into the lake where they lived, from an erupting volcano. So Riversleigh, in addition to its diversity and excellent preservation is also special because it spans such a long period of time – more than 10 million years – offering a remarkable insight into the evolution of the unique fauna of Australia.

—Richard I. Gibson

Links:

Cambrian fossils in the Thorntonia

A good overview

Lists of species