Re: Ornithopod-dominated tracksite from Lower Cretaceous Jiaguan Formation of China

[Ben Creisler <bcreisler@gmail.com>]

My apologies to the authors and the list. Apparently the copy
highlighting slipped when I pasted the ref from the source and left
off some authors. I've had this happen before with long author lists
and missed the problem before I hit send. Here's the corrected
version. Ouch...


Lida Xing , Martin G. Lockley, Daniel Marty, Jianping Zhang, Yan Wang,
Hendrik Klein, Richard T. McCrea, Lisa G. Buckley, Matteo Belvedere,
Octávio Mateus, Gerard D. Gierliński, Laura Piñuela, W. Scott Persons
IV, Fengping Wang, Hao Ran, Hui Dai & Xianming Xie (2015)
An Ornithopod-Dominated Tracksite from the Lower Cretaceous Jiaguan
Formation (Barremian–Albian) of Qijiang, South-Central China: New
Discoveries, Ichnotaxonomy, Preservation and Palaeoecology.
PLoS ONE 10(10): e0141059.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0141059
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0141059

On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 11:05 AM, Ben Creisler <bcreisler@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ben Creisler
> bcreisler@gmail.com
>
> New in PLoS ONE:
>
> T. McCrea, Lisa G. Buckley, Matteo Belvedere, Octávio Mateus, Gerard
> D. Gierliński, Laura Piñuela, W. Scott Persons, Fengping Wang, Hao
> Ran, Hui Dai & Xianming Xie  (2015)
> An Ornithopod-Dominated Tracksite from the Lower Cretaceous Jiaguan
> Formation (Barremian–Albian) of Qijiang, South-Central China: New
> Discoveries, Ichnotaxonomy, Preservation and Palaeoecology.
> PLoS ONE 10(10): e0141059.
> doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0141059
> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0141059
>
> The historically-famous Lotus Fortress site, a deep
> 1.5–3.0-meter-high, 200-meter-long horizonal notch high up in
> near-vertical sandstone cliffs comprising the Cretaceous Jiaguan
> Formation, has been known since the 13th Century as an impregnable
> defensive position. The site is also extraordinary for having multiple
> tetrapod track-bearing levels, of which the lower two form the floor
> of part of the notch, and yield very well preserved asseamblages of
> ornithopod, bird (avian theropod) and pterosaur tracks. Trackway
> counts indicate that ornithopods dominate (69%) accounting for at
> least 165 trackmakers, followed by bird (18%), sauropod (10%), and
> pterosaur (3%). Previous studies designated Lotus Fortress as the type
> locality of Caririchnium lotus and Wupus agilis both of which are
> recognized here as valid ichnotaxa. On the basis of multiple parallel
> trackways both are interpreted as representing the trackways of
> gregarious species. C. lotus is redescribed here in detail and
> interpreted to indicate two age cohorts representing subadults that
> were sometimes bipedal and larger quadrupedal adults. Two other
> previously described dinosaurian ichnospecies, are here reinterpreted
> as underprints and considered nomina dubia. Like a growing number of
> significant tetrapod tracksites in China the Lotus Fortress site
> reveals new information about the composition of tetrapod faunas from
> formations in which the skeletal record is sparse. In particular, the
> site shows the relatively high abundance of Caririchium in a region
> where saurischian ichnofaunas are often dominant. It is also the only
> site known to have yielded Wupus agilis. In combination with
> information from other tracksites from the Jiaguan formation and other
> Cretaceous formations in the region, the track record is proving
> increasingly impotant as a major source of information on the
> vertebrate faunas of the region. The Lotus Fortress site has been
> developed as a spectacular, geologically-, paleontologically- and a
> culturally-significant destination within Qijiang National Geological
> Park.