Submission Type
Poster
Abstract
The Hartland Shale of the Upper Cretaceous Greenhorn Limestone is a rock unit broadly distributed in north-central Kansas, that formed in the Western Interior Seaway, a Late Cretaceous epicontinental seaway in North America approximately 93 million years ago. The vertebrate fossil record of the Hartland Shale of Kansas is poorly known, where previous records were confined to a tooth of the extinct lamniform shark Cretoxyrhina mantelli and skeletal remains of a plesiosaur besides taxonomically uninformative bones and teeth of bony fishes. Here, we describe additional teeth of C. mantelli as well as the discovery of multiple teeth belonging to a bony fish Pachyrhizodus minimus collected from a locality in Republic County, Kansas. Examination of microscopic fossils from a sediment sample collected from the site is still ongoing, and the taxonomic diversity of the fossil fauna is expected to increase, which in turn will help decipher the marine ecosystem during the deposition of the Hartland Shale better.
Included in
Preliminary report on fossil marine vertebrates from the Upper Cretaceous Hartland Shale from Republic County, Kansas
The Hartland Shale of the Upper Cretaceous Greenhorn Limestone is a rock unit broadly distributed in north-central Kansas, that formed in the Western Interior Seaway, a Late Cretaceous epicontinental seaway in North America approximately 93 million years ago. The vertebrate fossil record of the Hartland Shale of Kansas is poorly known, where previous records were confined to a tooth of the extinct lamniform shark Cretoxyrhina mantelli and skeletal remains of a plesiosaur besides taxonomically uninformative bones and teeth of bony fishes. Here, we describe additional teeth of C. mantelli as well as the discovery of multiple teeth belonging to a bony fish Pachyrhizodus minimus collected from a locality in Republic County, Kansas. Examination of microscopic fossils from a sediment sample collected from the site is still ongoing, and the taxonomic diversity of the fossil fauna is expected to increase, which in turn will help decipher the marine ecosystem during the deposition of the Hartland Shale better.
Comments
Brianna E. Ortiz and Kenshu Shimada
DePaul University Department of Environmental Science and Studies