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Discussion of ‘The Triassic U–Pb age for the aquatic long-necked protorosaur of Guizhou, China’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2014

J. Liu*
Affiliation:
School of Resources and Environmental Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, CAS, Nanjing 210008, China; E-mail: [email protected]

Extract

First, I would like to congratulate Wang et al. (2014) for their important work on the dating of the Panxian fauna, a Triassic fossil Lagerstätte that has produced many exquisitely preserved marine reptiles (Motani et al. 2008) and that marks the full recovery of the marine ecosystem (Jiang et al. 2009) following the Permian–Triassic marine mass extinction (PTME). Papers by Wang et al. (2014) and alike are especially welcomed by vertebrate palaeontologists since they provide precise dating results for some of the most important vertebrate fossils in the world, such as the bizarre protorosaur Dinocephalosaurus orientalis (Li, Rieppel & LaBarbera, 2004) and the earliest marine archosaur Qianosuchus mixtus (Li et al. 2006). This related topic is also interesting because of the very recent debate about the timing of recovery from the PTME, the largest biodiversity crash during the Phanerozoic, from the predators’ perspective (Chen & Benton, 2012; Scheyer et al. 2014).

Type
Discussion
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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