Phytostratigraphic Scale of the Non-Marine Cretaceous of North-Eastern Russia: An Attempt to Create and Results

Abstract

In the early 1970s, palaeobotanist V.A. Samylina published her concept of stratofloras – a stratigraphic scale of the Cretaceous non-marine deposits of North-Eastern Asia based on plant megafossils. It was based on data on the evolution of the systematic composition of plant communities during the transition from the Mesophyte to Cenophyte. Since the detail of this scale was not inferior to that of marine deposits, it almost immediately began to be used to determine the age and correlation of continental deposits in the region. The paper considers changes in ideas on the development of the regional flora in the process of receiving new data. It is shown that it is impossible to create a single regional scale, since the palaeolandscape environments in this territory were different. The precision of the scales for parts of the region with the same palaeolandscape setting appeares to be lower than the stages of the General Stratigraphic Scale.