Abstract
The living members of 113 families of bivalves and gastropods of the Californian Province include 698 species living at shelf depths, of which 538 or 77% are known as Pleistocene fossils from the same region; another 113 fossil species are extralimital, and 98 are extinct. Living species not found as fossils are chiefly rare today, and/or minute, fragile, and/or from deeper shelf habitats. Sampling of the Pleistocene record has been biased towards shallow-water assemblages. Fragile and minute forms are probably underrepresented in the record. Rare forms, however, are still appearing as new studies are conducted, and many rare species are yet to be discovered. At least 85% of durably skeletonized living species may have been captured in the record. It is probable that most durably skeletonized invertebrate species were represented in lithostratigraphic units throughout the Phanerozoic, but that this record is lost owing to erosion, burial, and destruction of skeletons in situ. The bulk of the marine invertebrate fossil record does not represent a series of unusual skeletal accumulations, but rather the preserved remnants of an excellent original record formed through ordinary though episodic processes.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Paleontology,General Agricultural and Biological Sciences,Ecology,Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Reference95 articles.
1. Late Pleistocene marine fauna, Goleta, California;Wright;Journal of Paleontology,1972
2. Late Cenozoic rocky-shore assemblages from Anacapa Island, California;Valentine;Journal of Paleontology,1963
3. Amino acid age estimates of marine terraces and sea levels on San Nicolas Island, California
4. Spatial resolution in subfossil molluscan remains: Implications for paleobiological analyses
Cited by
123 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献