Early Permian fossil vertebrate footprints and their stratigraphic setting in megacyclic sequence II red beds, Prim Point, Prince Edward Island

Abstract

Vertebrate trace fossils are reported for the first time from red beds near the top of megacyclic sequence II at Prim Point in southwestern Prince Edward Island. They occur as casts of tetrapod trackways. The ichnocoenose also includes a rich invertebrate ichnofauna. The trackmakers thrived in an area of sparse vegetation and occupied out-of-channel river sediments, most likely crevasse-splay deposits.Amphisauropus latus, represented by three trackways, has been previously reported from Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. It is here interpreted as the track of a cotylosaur. It occurs together with the track of Gilmoreichnus kablikae, which is either a captorhinomorph or possibly a juvenile pelycosaur. These facilitate the assignment of a late Early Permian (late Autunian) age to the strata. The third set of footprints, those of a small herbivorous pelycosaur, compare most closely with Ichniotherium willsi, known hitherto from the Keele beds (latest Stephanian) of the English Midlands.This ichnocoenose occurs in a plate-tectonically rafted segment of crust stratigraphically equivalent to the same association of ichnofauna in the English Midlands and central Europe. The community occupied piedmont-valley-flat red beds within the molasse facies of Variscan uplands.