Oldest known naiaditid bivalve from the high-latitude Late Devonian (Famennian) of South Africa offers clues to survival strategies following the Hangenberg mass extinction

2017 ◽  
Vol 471 ◽  
pp. 31-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Scholze ◽  
Robert W. Gess
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
High Latitude ◽  
Mass Extinction ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
Late Devonian

High-latitude Chondrichthyans from the Late Devonian (Famennian) Witpoort formation of South Africa

PalZ ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert W. Gess ◽  
Michael I. Coates
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
High Latitude ◽  
Late Devonian

scholarly journals Environmental Variation and How its Spatial Structure Influences the Cross-Shelf Distribution of High-Latitude Coral Communities in South Africa

Diversity ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean N. Porter ◽  
Michael H. Schleyer
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Continental Shelf ◽  
High Latitude ◽  
Environmental Variables ◽  
Environmental Gradients ◽  
High Tide ◽  
Environmental Variation ◽  
Shelf Edge ◽  
Spatial Differences ◽  
Coral Communities

Coral communities display spatial patterns. These patterns can manifest along a coastline as well as across the continental shelf due to ecological interactions and environmental gradients. Several abiotic surrogates for environmental variables are hypothesised to structure high-latitude coral communities in South Africa along and across its narrow shelf and were investigated using a correlative approach that considered spatial autocorrelation. Surveys of sessile communities were conducted on 17 reefs and related to depth, distance to high tide, distance to the continental shelf edge and to submarine canyons. All four environmental variables were found to correlate significantly with community composition, even after the effects of space were removed. The environmental variables accounted for 13% of the variation in communities; 77% of this variation was spatially structured. Spatially structured environmental variation unrelated to the environmental variables accounted for 39% of the community variation. The Northern Reef Complex appears to be less affected by oceanic factors and may undergo less temperature variability than the Central and Southern Complexes; the first is mentioned because it had the lowest canyon effect and was furthest from the continental shelf, whilst the latter complexes had the highest canyon effects and were closest to the shelf edge. These characteristics may be responsible for the spatial differences in the coral communities.

scholarly journals Precisely dating the Frasnian–Famennian boundary: implications for the cause of the Late Devonian mass extinction

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
L. M. E. Percival ◽  
J. H. F. L. Davies ◽  
U. Schaltegger ◽  
D. De Vleeschouwer ◽  
A.-C. Da Silva ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mass Extinction ◽  
Late Devonian

A forest fire and soil erosion event during the Late Devonian mass extinction

2013 ◽  
Vol 392 ◽  
pp. 272-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kunio Kaiho ◽  
Susumu Yatsu ◽  
Masahiro Oba ◽  
Paul Gorjan ◽  
Jean-Georges Casier ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Soil Erosion ◽  
Forest Fire ◽  
Mass Extinction ◽  
Late Devonian

scholarly journals Global seawater redox trends during the Late Devonian mass extinction detected using U isotopes of marine limestones

2018 ◽  
Vol 503 ◽  
pp. 68-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. White ◽  
Maya Elrick ◽  
Stephen Romaniello ◽  
Feifei Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Mass Extinction ◽  
Late Devonian

A tetrapod fauna from within the Devonian Antarctic Circle

Science ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 360 (6393) ◽  
pp. 1120-1124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Gess ◽  
Per Erik Ahlberg
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
North America ◽  
Late Devonian ◽  
Body Fossil ◽  
The Antarctic

Until now, all known fossils of tetrapods (limbed vertebrates with digits) and near-tetrapods (such asElpistostege,Tiktaalik, andPanderichthys) from the Devonian period have come from localities in tropical to subtropical paleolatitudes. Most are from Laurussia, a continent incorporating Europe, Greenland, and North America, with only one body fossil and one footprint locality from Australia representing the southern supercontinent Gondwana. Here we describe two previously unknown tetrapods from the Late Devonian (late Famennian) Gondwana locality of Waterloo Farm in South Africa, then located within the Antarctic Circle, which demonstrate that Devonian tetrapods were not restricted to warm environments and suggest that they may have been global in distribution.

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