Showing partial skeleton of gliding reptile Kuehneosaurus on rock from Emborough.
Credit: David Whiteside
200 million years, give or take a few thousand years, before creationists believe Earth and life on it were all created by magic from nothing in a week, gliding lizard-like reptiles related to ancestral crocodiles, were gliding from tree to tree, and probably hunting flying insects, in what is now the Mendip Hills, near Bristol, UK. The area around Bristol was then an archipelago of islands in a sub-tropical, shallow sea.
Fossil remains of these reptiles were found by University of Bristol Masters student Mike Cawthorne, researching numerous reptile fossils from limestone quarries, in what was then the biggest sub-tropical island at the time, called the Mendip Palaeo-island.
As the Bristol University press release explains:
The study, published today in Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, also records the presence of reptiles with complex teeth, the trilophosaur Variodens and the aquatic Pachystropheus that probably lived similarly to a modern-day otter likely eating shrimps and small fish.
The animals either fell or their bones were washed into caves and cracks in the limestone.
“All the beasts were small,” said Mike. “I had hoped to find some dinosaur bones, or even their isolated teeth, but in fact I found everything else but dinosaurs.
“The collections I studied had been made in the 1940s and 1950s when the quarries were still active, and palaeontologists were able to visit and see fresh rock faces and speak to the quarrymen.”
Professor Mike Benton, from Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, explained: “It took a lot of work identifying the fossil bones, most of which were separate and not in a skeleton.
“However, we have a lot of comparative material, and Mike Cawthorne was able to compare the isolated jaws and other bones with more complete specimens from the other sites around Bristol.
“He has shown that the Mendip Palaeo-island, which extended from Frome in the east to Weston-super-Mare in the west, nearly 30 km long, was home to diverse small reptiles feeding on the plants and insects.
“He didn’t find any dinosaur bones, but it’s likely that they were there because we have found dinosaur bones in other locations of the same geological age around Bristol.”
The area around Bristol 200 million years ago in the Late Triassic was an archipelago of small islands set in a warm sub-tropical sea.
Bristol’s Dr David Whiteside added: “The bones were collected by some great fossil finders in the 1940s and 1950s including Tom Fry, an amateur collector working for Bristol University and who generally cycled to the quarries and returned laden with heavy bags of rocks.
“The other collectors were the gifted researchers Walter Kühne, a German who was imprisoned in Great Britain in the 2nd world war, and Pamela L. Robinson from University College London. They gave their specimens to the Natural History Museum in London and the Geological collections of the University of Bristol.”
AbstractBut then what did the authors of Genesis know about the climate in, and location of, what is now south-east England 200 million years earlier, when they didn't even know about Europe and thought Earth was small, flat and just a few thousand years old? This is why so much of it is now having to be reclassified as 'allegorical' or 'metaphorical' by mainstream Christians, leaving only a dwindling cult of fruitloop fanatics still believe it is the inerrant word of an omniscient creator god, laughable though that demonstrably absurd, childish notion is.
During the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic, the area around Bristol and South Wales was an archipelago of islands occupied by diverse small-sized tetrapods. The largest of these palaeo-islands was Mendip Island, now forming the Mendip Hills, and the location of some famous fossiliferous sites. These sites have not been described in detail before, and we present new data on three of them. Highcroft has yielded only sparse remains of rhynchocephalians, and Batscombe famously the gliding reptile Kuehneosuchus latissimus. Emborough yielded the richest fauna of the three, abundant pseudosuchians including crocodylomorphs as well as the gliding reptile Kuehneosaurus latus, rare trilophosaurs, a probable thalattosaur, rhynchocephalians, and the mammal Kuehneotherium. These include some of the last known taxa of clades that died out in the end-Triassic mass extinction. We report a new taxon of sphenosuchid crocodylomorph similar to Saltoposuchus and a find of Pachystropheus, an aquatic reptile shared with Holwell and the bedded Rhaetian at Blue Anchor Point, Aust and Westbury Garden Cliff. The discovery of a fish vertebra strengthens the model of Emborough fissure filling in a marginal marine location. The Emborough fauna differs from coeval assemblages from Cromhall, Tytherington and Ruthin in the scarcity of sphenodontians and the absence or great rarity of procolophonids as well as the abundance of kuehneosaurids and crocodylomorphs.
1. Introduction
The Triassic (252–201 Ma) was a crucial time in the recovery, restructuring and diversification of vertebrate life (Benton and Wu, 2022). Many modern groups including lissamphibians, turtles, lizards, crocodiles, and mammals originated or diversified in the Late Triassic, part of the process of the recovery of life from the end-Permian mass extinction, but stimulated by the Carnian Pluvial Episode 233–232 Ma, following which climates became more arid, and the new groups, including dinosaurs, had opportunities to diversify (Brusatte et al., 2010; Chen and Benton, 2012; Benton et al., 2014; Bernardi et al., 2018; Dal Corso et al., 2020; Benton 2021; Benton and Wu, 2022).
The end-Triassic mass extinction (ETME), 201 Ma, was probably caused by sharp warming from greenhouse gases erupted by the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP), associated with the beginning of rifting and opening of the North Atlantic (Blackburn et al., 2013). The environmental crisis led to widespread extinctions of many tetrapod clades including procolophonids, placodonts, kuehneosaurids, thalattosaurs, allokotosaurians and phytosaurs. Many pseudosuchians such as the rauisuchids also became extinct but the Crocodylomorpha survived leading to the modern living crocodilians. Whether the ETME was a single crisis at the end of the Triassic or began minimally 100 ka before the earliest known eruptions (Davies et al., 2017) is debated. Indeed, there is good evidence for several earlier events, one at the Norian–Rhaetian boundary (Rigo et al., 2020.1) and one equivalent to the middle of the Cotham Member in the British Rhaetian succession (Wignall and Atkinson, 2020.2), both marked by carbon isotope excursions and evidence for substantial loss of marine species. The spacing of these events is entirely dependent on estimates of the duration of the Rhaetian, with its beginning variously dated at 205.7 Ma and 201.7 Ma, making the stage either 4.2 or 0.2 Myr in duration (Maron et al., 2015; Ruhl et al., 2020.3).
These considerations around the importance of the Triassic as a whole, and the Late Triassic in particular, in documenting the origin of modern ecosystems on land and in the sea, as well as the evidence for phased bursts of extinction through the Rhaetian, place fresh importance on understanding the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic fossil faunas found bordering the Bristol Channel, around Bristol and in South Wales. These faunas are preserved across a sub-tropical archipelago (Fig. 1) in fissure fillings, deposits of soil and other debris accumulated in karstic cave systems (Whiteside et al., 2016; Lovegrove et al., 2021.1). First finds were isolated bones of the sauropodomorph dinosaur Thecodontosaurus in the Worrall Road Quarries in Bristol (Riley and Stutchbury, 1836, Riley and Stutchbury, 1840; Ballell et al., 2020.4) and then mammal remains at Holwell Quarry (Moore, 1859), and later recognition by Charles Moore that these were Mesozoic-aged fissures eroded into Carboniferous limestone. The study of the fissures began again in the late 1930s and the 1940s with the work of Walter Kühne and his discoveries of mammal remains at Holwell and elsewhere (Kühne, 1949; Savage, 1993; Whiteside and Duffin, 2017.1; Benton et al., 2024).
The fissure faunas have been reviewed several times (Robinson, 1957a; Fraser, 1994; Whiteside et al., 2016), and one of the key land masses was the Mendip Palaeoisland (Lovegrove et al., 2021.1), the site of five fossiliferous fissure sites, namely Emborough, Batscombe, Highcroft, Holwell, and Windsor Hill (Fig. 1). These sites have been reported before (Robinson, 1957a; Fraser, 1994) although not extensively, but Emborough has been featured in several publications (Robinson, 1957a, Robinson, 1957.1b, Robinson, 1962) because of the remarkable specimens of kuehneosaurids, also abundantly represented at Batscombe. These unique finds, however, are not replicated at other fossiliferous fissure sites on the Mendip Island, even at Highcroft and Holwell (Fig. 1). Likewise, although Emborough has produced abundant remains of archosauromorphs, these are very rare at Holwell.
Fig. 1. The Bristol palaeo-archipelago, showing island locations in the latest Triassic (early Rhaetian). Overview of the whole area, showing the Mendip Palaeoisland. The blue shallow seas between the islands are areas with deposition of the Westbury beds. Fissure fill localities are marked in red, bone beds in orange. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)Map from Lovegrove et al. (2021.1).
Our aim is to document three of the five Mendip Island fissure localities, Emborough, Batscombe, and Highcroft, whose terrestrial assemblages have not been published in detail before, and to present data on geology and taphonomy as well, to allow comparison with the other Late Triassic fissure faunas around Bristol and in South Wales.
Anatomical abbreviations. a, anterior; ac, anterior condyle; ace, acetabulum; amafe, anterior margin of antorbital fenestra; amp, amphicoelous; ampl, amphyplatyan; an, angular; ap, anterior projection; ar, articulation(s); artf, facet for the articular bone; at, attachment; bic, bicapitate; bs, basipterygoid; c capitulum; ca, capitelum; ce, centrum; cfo, coracoid foramen; cn, canal; co, condyle; cx, convex (surface); di, diapophysis; dis, distal; desf, surface contacting dentary; dpc, deltopectoral crest; dor, dorsal; ec, ectopterygoid; ect, ectepicondyle; ent, entepicondyle; er, erupting; fc, fibular contact; fcp, facial process; fct, facet; fl, flat surface; fla, flange; fo, foramen; fos, fossa; gl, glenoid; gr, groove; hd, head; itfe, inferior temporal fenestra; l, lateral; ls, ligament scar; mc, medial condyle; mk, meckelian; ml, midline; ms, muscle scar; ne, neural; palf, facet for the palatine; pc, pleuracrodont; pco, posterior condyle; pozy, postzygapophysis; pr, process; prz, prezygapophysis; pm, prominance; po, posterior; pp, parapophysis; prx, proximal; rid, ridge(s); saf, surangular facet; sar, sacral rib; sc, supinator crest; ser, serrations; sf, surface; sh, shallow; slf, shelf; sp, spine; spl, splenial; stfe, superior temporal fenestra; sut, suture; t tuberculum; th, tooth (teeth); tb, tubercle; tc, trochlear groove; tcn, tibia contact; tr, trochanter; tv, transverse; ven, ventral; vmaf, ventral margin for adductor fossa; wr, wear; zy, zygapophysis.
Institutional acronyms. AMNH, American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA; BRSMG, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol; BRSUG, University of Bristol, Geology Collection; NHMUK, Natural History Museum, London; SMNS, State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart, Germany; TTU, Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock; UCMP, University of California Museum of Palaeontology; UNC, Department of Geological Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Cawthorne, Michael; Whiteside, David I.; Benton, Michael J.
Latest Triassic terrestrial microvertebrate assemblages from caves on the Mendip palaeoisland, S.W. England, at Emborough, Batscombe and Highcroft Quarries
Proceedings of the Geologists' Association (2024) S0016787823000998. DOI:10.1016/j.pgeola.2023.12.003
Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by Elsevier B.V., Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
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