Turtles From an Arkadelphia Formation—Midway Group Lag Deposit (Maastrichtian—Paleocene), Hot Spring County, Arkansas, USA

Authors

Martin A. Becker, William Paterson University
Harry M. Maisch IV, CUNY Graduate Center
John A. Chamberlain Jr., CUNY Brooklyn CollegeFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-14-2016

Abstract

The Arkadelphia Formation—Midway Group (Maastrichtian—Paleocene) contact near Malvern, Arkansas preserves a K-Pg boundary assemblage of turtle species consisting of skull, shell, and non-shell postcranial skeletal elements. The Malvern turtles are preserved within a coquina lag deposit that comprises the basalmost Midway Group and also contains an abundance of other reptiles, as well as chondrichthyans, osteichthyans, and invertebrates. This coquina lag deposit records a complex taphonomic history of exhumation and reburial of vertebrate skeletal elements along a dynamic ancestral shoreline in southwestern Arkansas during the late Cretaceous-early Paleocene. Based on stratigraphic occurrence, the Malvern turtle assemblage indicates that these marine reptiles were living at or near the time of the K-Pg mass extinction and represent some of the latest Cretaceous turtles yet recovered from the Gulf Coastal Plain of the United States.

Comments

This article originally appeared in Geosciences, available at DOI: 10.3390/geosciences6030041

© 2016 by the authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).