Sediments, plants, and animals: fossils, trace fossils, paleoecology, and evolution

Professor Neil Davies¹, Dr William McMahon¹, Dr Anthony Shillito²

¹University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, ²University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada

In modern environments, biogeomorphology describes the two-way interaction between biotic and dynamic abiotic landscape elements and has risen to prominence in recent decades by recognizing the contribution of living organisms to landscape stability, dynamics and roughness.  While there has been a lag in applying this knowledge to the ancient record, it is increasingly apparent that the frontier between palaeontology and sedimentary geology can be a blurred and complicated boundary. Ancient animals and plants were not always mere fossils in museum drawers, and sedimentary facies were not purely physical phenomena that provided a passive back-drop in the theatre of evolution. Elucidating the interactions between ancient life and environments can involve a variety of disciplines, ranging from ichnology, sedimentary architectural and facies analysis, modelling, and petrography. New insights from these fields are demonstrating that clastic strata – often seen as the ‘abiotic’ sister to biogenic carbonates – can be rich records of biogeomorphology and geo-evolutionary feedback on scales from individual organisms and bedforms to the evolutionary history of entire groups of organisms and global stratigraphic facies shifts.

This session aims to bring together novel research from several subdisciplines of sedimentology to ascertain the ancient record of life-sediment interactions on the full variety of spatio-temporal scales. It will, through the presentation of case studies within this theme, unravel the deep time landscape memory of evolution that underlies many sedimentary and geomorphic phenomena in modern siliciclastic sedimentary environments.