Book Synopsis Paleofaunistics of Nonmammalian Vertebrates from the Late Pleistocene of the Mississippi-Alabama Black Prairie by :
Download or read book Paleofaunistics of Nonmammalian Vertebrates from the Late Pleistocene of the Mississippi-Alabama Black Prairie written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mississippi-Alabama Black Prairie is a distinct geologic, physiographic, and phytogeographic district within the Gulf Coastal Plain Province of southeastern North America. Residing in the alluvial portions of local Quaternary regolith are rare and diffusely distributed vertebrate fossils collectively possessing a Rancholabrean (NALMA) character. Derived from stream-concentrated lags, this seemingly loose association of vertebrate fossils is defined herein as the Late Pleistocene Black Prairie fossil assemblage (BPA). Although some systematic and interpretive work has been published in the past, much remains to be done, specifically with regard to defining the assemblage in terms of a local paleofauna and thereby exploring its usefulness as a paleoenvironmental tool. In the light of new species discoveries, the current paper explores assemblage paleofaunistics using the nonmammalian component. The first part of this study provides a comprehensive and detailed morphometric and comparative description of the vertebrate remains in order to identify as many individual fossil specimens as possible from the very fragmentary BPA. In a stream-concentrated assemblage, turtle shell elements and snake vertebrae, for example, can provide much paleoecological information, but if heavily eroded by abrasive lag components and reworking, their identification can be labor intensive with many pieces remaining unidentified. Many assemblage and paleofaunal systematic accounts in the published literature consist of weak and even baseless attributions or of simple faunal lists alone. Such brief descriptive systematic treatments provide little if any justification for the taxonomic assignment. Therefore, the first half of this paper attempts to identify and describe important characters useful in the identification of certain non-mammalian vertebrates, primarily the freshwater turtles, which were not adequately covered in earlier accounts of the BPA. The second part of this study is in.
