Re: The K-T boundary in Nanxiong

[longrich@alumni.princeton.edu]

On Monday, June 10, 2002, at 04:00 AM, John Bois wrote:

> Many thanks to HPDM for his summary of doings in Nanxiong.  Do you
> know of Taylor's recent work in the Nanxiong.  This is said to have
> revealed dino egg shells 50M higher than the "K/T chemical horizon".
> (apologies if this has been mentioned before).

	Re: Elephant bird eggs, it is very common to find elephant bird 
eggshell on the beaches in Southwest Madagascar, one can pick up 
literally hundreds of pieces in an hour in some places. Some of the 
stuff is porous and subfossil, other stuff is hard and permineralized. 
The porous stuff comes out of the dunes, the permineralized stuff seems 
to come out of old shell-rich beach conglomerates. So somewhere there 
are probably 21st century deposits forming which are fairly rich in the 
eggshell of long-extinct birds.
	As has been noted before, what we really need is an indisputable 
post K-T nonavian dinosaur nest, an articulated or maybe even just 
associated skeleton, or a tracksite, since none of these can be reworked 
into younger deposits. However none of these things have been 
conclusively demonstrated to my knowledge, and here I'm not convinced 
its a sampling problem because people have been looking for dinosaurs 
for a long time, and also for Eocene mammals for a long time, so sooner 
or later you'd think someone would have stumbled across a dinosaur and 
then figured out that it was Tertiary. People of all kinds of scientific 
background and preconcieved notions have been looking for fossils in 
these sediments, it seems like they should have found dinosaurs 
already... if in fact any such skeletons did exist. 	
	Another interesting example is that in the Cedar Mountain formation 
there are squillions of gastroliths (it must be absolutely enormous 
given their high abundance in small outcroppings of particular levels, 
and the vast extent of these beds). Some of these are actually 
gastroliths made by grinding up fossils- e.g. silicified corals and 
bryozoans! I've been told there are also petrified wood gastroliths too. 
Lots of them are cherts so who knows what kind of stuff is in them. 
Kinda weird when you think about it.