Exam Review

GEOSCIENCE

Taphonomy/Paleoecology GEOS 417

EXAM REVIEW

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EXAM 1 = Thursday Feb. 21st

TOPICS

What is Taphonomy? - fossil preservation (Diagenesis)

What is Taphonomy? - Biostratinomy

What is Taphonomy? (diagram)

Rules of Taphonomy

Taphonomic Models

Ways to die

Vertebrate Biostratinomy

REVIEW QUESTIONS

What is taphonomy?
What is taphonomy used for?
a very small fraction of organisms that have lived on Earth represented as fossils......Why?
Which realm has the more complete fossil record - Terrestrial or marine? Why?
The probability of preservation is enhanced by what two things?
What are the typical types of fossil preservation? What are some of the types of exceptional fossil preservation?
What are the three subdivisions of taphonomy (describe each one)?
What are the biological biostratinomic factors?
What are the mechanical or sedimentological factors of biostratinomy?
How can you detect transport in a fossil assemblage?
What are some the major differences between a fossil assemblage that can be characterized as a life assemblage and one that is a death assemblage in terms of characteristics and how they formed?
How do you tell the 3 types of fossil assemblages apart?
How does a fossil assemblage become time-averaged, and what does that mean?
Why is the community structure of a life assemblage and death assemblage commonly different?
What is the difference between allochthonous, parautochthonous, and autochthonous fossil assemblages?
Why is taphonomic loss most severe in shallow marine environments?
How is taphonomic loss in vertebrate fossil assemblages commonly expressed?
Why is it important to know the taxa to which you are applying taphonomic principles to?
What is a Lagerstatten?
What are the major differences between the 4 types of shell beds in Kidwell’s R-sediment model?
What sorts of criteria could you use to distinguishes a fossil bone assemblage that represented a catastrophic event from one that represents attrition?
What are the two major approaches for analyzing mode of death?
Why might conodonts be useful for distinguishing the amount of time averaging in assemblages that are between-environment or biostratigraphically condensed?
What factors can make corals more susceptible to breakage or transport?
How can storms be damaging to reefs?
What orientation do the shells of bivalves and brachiopods take if they have been exposed to even moderate currents?
How can arthropods produce more than one skeleton to contribute to the fossil record?
Does disarticulation in echinoderms necessarily mean exposure to many taphonomic processes? Why or why not?
What is time averaging? Also, what are the potential benefits of time averaging to paleontological studies?
What would be the possible taphonomic trends of fossil assemblages within a trangressive-regressive cycle?
What generally has to happen to preserve an echinodernm as an articulated fossils?
Why do arthropods commonly require exceptional forms of preservation to get preserved as a fossil?
Why is it more likely to find articulated brachiopods rather than articulated bivalves?
How has the view of taphonomy and taphonomic processes changed especially after the works of Kidwell and Behrensmeyer?
What are some of the new directions in Taphonomic studies as described by Behrensmeyer and Kidwell 1985?
What is habitat tracking (according to the Brett et al. paper)?
What is coordinated statsis?

e-mail me leonardk@mnstate.edu if you have trouble with these questions.

EXAM 2 = Thursday April 25th

TOPICS

Vertebrate Biostratinomy

Butchery and other biostratinomic features

Soils and Vertebrate Diagenesis

Plant Biostratinomy

Time Averaging

Paleoecology

REVIEW QUESTIONS

What is time averaging, how does it happen, and how does it influece paleoecological studies?
How can butchery be recognized from an assemblage of bones? What processes can produce bone surface features that can be mistaken for butchery?
What characteristics of soils have an influence on the preservation potential of bones?
Where would you expect stratigraphic sections to be more complete, marine or terrestrial environments? Why?
Give examples of some of the criteria used to interpret some of the physical limiting factors on the distribution of organisms?
Why does sea level change?
How do we document community structure within a fossil assemblage?
What types of bone fractures would you expect to occur during butchery, and why does dry bone behave differently than fresh bone?
Why is it sometimes difficult to recognize possible tools in the archeological record?
What are the factors that contribute to the development of soils?
What are the horizons in a typical soil profile, and what are the major differences between arid, temperate, and tropical soils?
Why are paleosols difficult to recognize in the rock record?
How might the biostratinomic factors for plants be different than that for fossil bone?
What is paleoecology?
List and describe the physical limiting factors for the paleoecology of individual fossil species?
What are the two types of limiting factors which influence the spatial distribution of living and fossil organisms?
What might the diversity of a fossil assemblage indicate about the environment in which the fossils lived?
What are the two major subdivisions of paleoecology?
What are some of the differences one must consider between the biostratinomy of Plants versus Skeletal Organisms?
Why is it so difficult to interpret water depth from the geologic record?
What are some of the methods for determining the temperatures that a fossil assemblage was subjected to?
What criteria did the bone beds meet in Rogers (1990) that suggested the mortality because of draught stress for this assemblage of dinosaurs?
What are the possible input pathways for bones that get transported by fluvial systems?
In terrestrial environments, information loss is largely the result of what?
What criteria can be used to identify the surface features on bones as signs of butchery?
What is a soil, and what are the properties of soils which tend to favor or inhibit the preservation of bone?
What was the purpose of the Hollocher, et al (2005) paper?
What is a coprolite and why would we study them?
Why were the coporlites in the Hollocher, et al (2005) study mostly phosphatic in composition?
What are the two major categories of paleoecology and how are they different?
What was the purpose of the Jennings and Hasiotis paper?
What was the taphonomy of the deposit and what did this imply?
What interpretations could Jennings and Hasiotis make because of their highly resolved control on the spatial distribution of those deposits?

FINAL EXAM = Wednesday, May 15th, 3:00 pm

TOPICS - comprehensive - see list above

Stratigraphy and Paleoecology (new material)

FORMAT - 10 short answer questions

new questions

What is the Sepkoski curve and what does it mean?
When examining a fossil asseblage, why might it be safer to record and use presence/absence data as opposed to relative abundance (What did Olszewski and Patskowsky say about this)?
List and describe the biological factors that influence the paleoecology of an individual species?
How do communities of marine organisms respond to shifting environments resulting from transgressions and regressions?
What does a layer of rock represent and why does it change laterally?
What was the purpose of the Olszewski and Patskowsky paper?
What were the two major types of fossil assemblages in the Permian of Kansas, and what did each represetn in terms of environment?
What was the purpose of the Colson et al. paper
How is the CHS bone bed different from other Hell Creek dinosaur localities?
What are the depositional evironments of the Fox Hills and Hell Creek formations at the CHS locality, and what did they base these interpretations on?
How did the CHS bone bed form....what did Colson et al. base this interpretation on?

e-mail me leonardk@mnstate.edu if you have any concerns