Jurassic vertebrate bromalites of the western United States in the context of the global record
Keywords:
bromalite, coprolite, consumulite, evisceralite, Jurassic, Morrison Formation, Sundance Formation, western USAAbstract
The bromalite record of the western United States is quite limited, especially in contrast to the Triassic and Cretaceous records of the same region. Indeed, there are only a handful of well documented vertebrate bromalites from the Jurassic strata of the western USA, including: (1) coprolites from the nonmarine Early Jurassic Glen Canyon Group; (2) consumulites and evisceralites from the Middle Jurassic Todilto and Sundance formations; and (3) consumulites, putative coprolites and pseudobromalites from the nonmarine Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation. Early Jurassic red beds are notably less fossiliferous than those of the Triassic (e.g., contrast the fossil record of the Chinle and Glen Canyon groups). The Middle Jurassic of the region includes several eolianites and sabkha-like deposits representing environments that preserve few bromalites. The Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation contains abundant vertebrate body fossils and many tracks but very few bromalites in contrast to many broadly similar fluvial deposits of Triassic and Cretaceous age in the same region. The global bromalite record also appears to be depauperate in the Jurassic, with a few exceptions such as marine shales and lithographic limestones in Europe (e.g., Lower Jurassic of England, Upper Jurassic Solnhofen Limestone of Bavaria). This relative lack of a global Jurassic bromalite record may in part be more a result of a lack of collection and study. However, the relative lack of nonmarine bromalites is clearly influenced by high sea levels in the Early Jurassic, a paucity of Middle Jurassic nonmarine vertebrate-bearing units and a lack, or lack of recognition of, bromalites in major Upper Jurassic nonmarine vertebrate faunas (e.g., China, Tanzania, Portugal, etc.). In the Western United States there is clearly a need for more detailed examination of known specimens (e.g., putative Morrison coprolites) and a focus on collecting more examples.Downloads
Issue
Section
License
Submission of a manuscript implies that the work described has not been published before (except in the form of an abstract or a part of a lecture, review or thesis) and that is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. If and when the manuscript is accepted for publication, the authors agree to transfer the copyright of their work to the publisher. The copyright covers the exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the work, all translation rights as well as the rights to publish the work in any electronic form.
Copyright allows you to protect your original material and stop others from using your work without your permission. It means others will generally need to credit you and your work properly, increasing its impact. If you choose to assign copyright to us, as part of the publication process, you will be asked to sign a publishing agreement. This will be after your manuscript has been through the peer-review process, been accepted, and moves into production.
Authors and authors responsibilities: Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the manuscript content. All those who have made significant contribution should be listed as co-authors. It is declared by the author(s) that manuscripts in all categories submitted to the journal and subjects to peer-review have not been published or submitted to any other journal or book. If the manuscript is written by several authors, the corresponding author should be indicated. It is declared that the corresponding author represents all the co-authors in certifying that all of them contributed meaningfully in preparation of the study, and that the final submitted version of the text is approved by all the co-authors. The author(s) should not publish in their study any copied part of the text and or figures from other sources without proper citation or permission (if necessary) – which is plagiarism – and stay in conflict with basal requirements of the authorship. All the authors are obliged to participate in peer review process, providing retractions or corrections of mistakes. The author(s) should indicate (the best in acknowledgements) the financial support and/or program within which the study has been prepared. Affiliation (all authors/co-authors) and corresponding address (main author) must be clearly stated.
Publication ethics and malpractice requirements: the Volumina Jurassica seeks to publish original work in the best possible form and to the highest possible standards. It is necessary to agree upon standards of expected ethical behavior for all parties involved in the act of publishing (authors, editors, peer reviewers, publisher). The Volumina Jurassica ethic statements are based on the guidelines and standards developed and published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE- http://publicationethics.org/).
Anti-plagiarism Policy: Plagiarism is understood in the sense of the “use another person’s ideas or work and pretend that it is own’ (Cambridge Dictionary) or “the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own” (Oxford Dictionaries), self-plagiarism (re-use of significant parts of one’s own copyrighted work without citing the original sources).
All articles in the Volumina Jurassica are supposed to be original. Authors submitting manuscript declare that submitted manuscript is original and has not been prepared from other published material. A paper should contain sufficient detail and references to permit others to replicate the work; any used information resources (phrases, data, images) must be appropriately cited or quoted.
Editors: the Volumina Jurassica editor is responsible for deciding which of the articles submitted to the journal should be published. The Volumina Jurassica editor will accept and evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content only. Editors must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone than stakeholders. The excluded from publication procedure are manuscripts which are beyond the scope of the interest of the journal (i.e. presenting the themes not related with the Jurassic System), and those evidently showing research misconduct (published elsewhere before, plagiarisms or bearing fundamental research mistakes). Unpublished manuscripts or materials must not be used in an editor’s own research. All submitted manuscripts will be considered for publication free of charge. When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the Publisher and cooperate with the editor to retract or correct the paper.
