Unusual bone bed reveals a vertebrate community with pterosaurs and turtles in equatorial Pangaea before the end-Triassic extinction.

ABSTRACT: Temporally constrained microvertebrate bone beds are powerful tools for understanding continent-scale biotic change. Such sites are rare globally in nonmarine settings during the 12 million years (Ma) preceding the end-Triassic extinction (ETE; ~201.5 Ma), obscuring patterns of faunal change across this interval. A vertebrate assemblage from Arizona, USA, provides unique insights into community composition and ecology prior to the ETE. PFV 393 is a macro- and microvertebrate bone bed preserved in a volcaniclastic fluvial channel-fill with a high-precision U-Pb zircon age of 209.187 ± 0.083 Ma. The fossil assemblage consists of three-dimensionally preserved, delicate, and small skeletal elements of known and new taxa that document a local paleocommunity including hybodontiformes, actinopter

SUBMITTER: Kligman BT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12304912 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature