Preface: Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Lithographic Limestone and Plattenkalk

Abstract

The symposiumFollowing the former editions of the International Sympo-sium on Lithographic Limestone and Plattenkalk ‘‘ISLLP’’(Lyon, 1991; Cuenca, 1995; Bergamo, 1999; Eichsta¨tt/Soln-hofen, 2005), Switzerland was the host country for the 5thISLLP in August 2009, jointly organised by the NaturalHistoryMuseumBaselandthePale´ontologieA16(Officedela culture, Porrentruy, Canton Jura). The NaturmuseumSolothurn (Switzerland) and the Staatliches Museum fu¨rNaturkunde Karlsruhe (Germany) were involved in theorganization of the fieldtrips.Thesymposium was attended by60researchersincludingestablishedpalaeontologistsandsedimentologists,aswellasyoung PhD students and post-docs from different Europeancountries but also from the USA and Brazil (Fig. 1a, b). WewishtoexpressourgratitudetotheInternationalAssociationof Sedimentologists (IAS) for sponsoring student travelgrants, and for general support ofthe Swiss PalaeontologicalSociety (SPS), the International Palaeontological Associa-tion (IPA), and the European Association of VertebratePalaeontologists (EAVP).Excellent keynote lectures, generously sponsored by theCommission of the Swiss Palaeontological Memoirs(KSPA), were given by Derek E.G. Briggs on moleculartaphonomy, Eberhard ‘‘Dino’’ Frey on pterosaurs, WalterG. Joyce on Late Jurassic turtles, and by Adolf ‘‘Dolf’’Seilacher on the role of biomats for the formation of litho-graphic limestone. The latter started the famous researchinitiative ‘‘Sonderforschungsbereich 53’’ on palaeoecologyand Fossil Lagersta¨tten in Tu¨bingen back in the 1980s,which was the renaissance of the Lithographic Limestoneand Black Shale research.During the oral and poster sessions (August 18th to20th), 23 talks and 8 poster contributions focused on newand exciting discoveries, palaeoecological and ichnologicalissues, but also on geochemical aspects of sedimentationrates or the importance of microbial mats during the for-mation and preservation of Lithographic Limestone. Thestudied localities are situated in Europe, South and LatinAmerica, the Middle East, and Asia and range in age fromthe Middle Cambrian to the Early Oligocene. During cof-fee, lunch, and tea breaks, there was plenty of time forinteresting and animated discussions in a familiar atmo-sphere, the occasion to make new acquaintances, to visitthe collections of the Natural History Museum Basel, oreven to take a swim in the river Rhine. The latter washighly recommended because of the unusual high outsidetemperatures.The three field trips benefited from ideal summer con-ditions. On Monday 17th we visited the Oligocene clay pitof Frauenweiler (Southern Germany) (Fig. 1c), which isfamous for fossil fishes (Micklich, 1998) and birds (Mayr& Micklich, 2010), notably the discovery of the oldesthummingbird (Mayr, 2004). This important quarry willfinally not be landfilled and excavations can still go on for