The naming of the Permian System

The naming of the Permian by Roderick Murchison in 1841 is well known. This is partly because he ‘completed’ the stratigraphic column at system level, but also because of the exotic aspects of his extended fieldwork in remote parts of Russia and Murchison's reputed character. Here, we explore several debated and controversial aspects of this act, benefiting from access to documents and reports notably from Russian sources. Murchison or Sedgwick could have provided a name for the unnamed lower New Red Sandstone in 1835 based on British successions or those in Germany, so perhaps the Imperial aim of naming time from British geology was not the urgent task some have assumed. Murchison has been painted as arrogant and Imperialistic, which was doubtless true, but at the time many saw him as a great leader, even an attractive individual. Others suggest he succeeded because he stood on the shoulders of local geologists; however, his abilities at brilliant and rapid geological synthesis are undoubted. Two unexpected consequences of his work are that this arch conservative is revered in Russia as a hero of geological endeavours, and, for all his bombast, his ‘Permian’ was not widely accepted until 100 years after its naming.Supplementary material:https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5412079

Radioisotopic and biostratigraphic constraints on the classical Middle–Upper Permian succession and tetrapod fauna of the Moscow syneclise, Russia

The East European Platform and the PreUrals are the regions where the Permian System was first established, but the provincialism of fossils and lack of radioisotopic age control have prevented the use there of the regional Permian subdivisions used outside of the region. We report the first U-Pb zircon chemical abrasion–isotope dilution–thermal ionization mass spectrometry (CA-ID-TIMS) age of 253.95 ± 0.06 Ma for a volcanic tuff from the terrestrial upper part of the lower Vyatkian Regional Stage in the Moscow syneclise (Russia). This age greatly improves the correlation of the East European Platform and the PreUrals with the international geologic time scale, and contributes to our understanding of sedimentation within the Permian-Triassic transition in the studied region. The new radioisotopic age integrated within the regional chronostratigraphic framework reveals the synchrony in extinction of faunas of the Dinocephalian superassemblage in the studied region with that in South Africa.