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PALAIOS

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Below the Sediment-Water-Interface: A New Frontier in Taphonomic Research

¹ Sally Walker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geology and cross appointed in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia. Sally has fond early childhood memories of playing in mud which continues to this day (she is pictured with her favorite device: "Patrick's Guillotine" specifically designed to core marsh sediments). She was born in the oil fields of Ventura, California. She received her B.A. at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research interests include burial processes, ecological stasis in modern and fossil Caribbean molluscs and their epi- and endobionts, taphonomy of outer shelf to deep-sea gastropods, and the paleoecology of terrestrial gastropods.

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As an undergraduate and then as a graduate student, I repeatedly came across in the paleontological literature what I considered to be the "paleontological mantra"—quick and rapid burial ensured that an organism might be preserved in the fossil record. I kept looking for tests of this "observation" but found little to appease my curiosity about this mysterious, yet profound process. As a graduate student, I buried shells with epibionts below the anoxic zone in a mudflat to examine the selective preservation of encrusting organisms that associated with hermit crab-inhabited shells. Additionally, I avidly read about descriptive analyses of taphonomic degradation and Plotnick's (1986) arthropod burial experiments. However, there was little work concerning the burial of molluscs and foraminiferans that compose a large portion of the hard parts preserved in Mesozoic and Cenozoic rocks. From my graduate work, I realized that rapid burial might not ensure preservation.

Johnson (1957) emphasized that the study of burial processes in the field was the key to understanding how organisms become fossils. Driscoll (1970) also was prescient when he said that two post-mortem environments exist: one above and one below the sediment-water interface, and that the differential destruction of shells in these two environments required attention. Despite these observations, few have gone below the sediment-water interface to examine burial processes. Most taphonomic loss is thought to occur at the sediment-water interface and within the bioturbation zone. The most important preservational factor affecting carbonate hard parts is considered to be dissolution from the acidic conditions produced by burrowing organisms (Aller, 1982). This area of carbonate hardpart destruction is called the "Taphonomically Active Zone" or the TAZ (Davies et al., 1989). Many argued that if hard parts are to be . . . [Full Text of this Article]

This article has been cited by other articles:

				Hydrodynamic Behavior of Brachiopod Shells: Experimental Estimates and Field Observations Palaios, October 1, 2004; 19(5): 441 - 450.