MANIFESTO OF THE SOUTH AMERICAN SCHOOL OF (ACTUALISTIC) TAPHONOMY

Abstract

When the young Charles Darwin explored the Atlantic coast of southern South America, he was impressed by its fossils—as he wrote in the first paragraph of the Origin of Species (1859)—and the magnitude of its “wide and desolate” plains (Darwin 1839, p. 124). Although his adventures on the Patagonian plains became more famous, Darwin’s first observations were on the Pampas, a flat area that covers parts of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, where the gaucho was lord and master. Since that time, these flat lowlands have been the object of much geological and paleontological research, but there is still much more to discover, especially in the field of taphonomy. South America is particularly suited to test taphonomic ideas thanks to the recent geological evolution of the area, associated with sea level oscillations since the Pleistocene, which left numerous lagoons and estuaries along the coast. In fact, the Patos Lagoon (Brazil) and Rio de La Plata (Uruguay and Argentina) are the largest lagoon and one of the largest estuaries in the world, respectively, providing vast areas of diverse shallow coastal environments. In the terrestrial realm, southern Argentina is characterized by fluvial systems originating in the high Andes Cordillera as well as numerous permanent and temporary lakes due to the gentle slope of the plain. In addition to a diverse array of marine and terrestrial environments, exposures of fossiliferous accumulations from continental shelf, coastal plain, and freshwater basin settings provide exceptional opportunities for comparing modern death assemblages with fossil counterparts. Thanks in part to this profusion of “natural taphonomy laboratories”, actualistic taphonomy in South America is experiencing a period of exciting growth and advancement. Studies on the southern Brazilian continental shelf have focused on the comparative taphonomy of bivalved mollusks and brachiopods (Kowalewski et al. 2002; Carrol et al. 2003; Rodland et al. 2004 …