Abstract
Community zonation of the Late Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway (WIS) of North America has been suggested for bivalves, cephalopods, foraminifera, gastropods, and tetrapods. Most proposed WIS community zones consist of a northern and southern subprovince with a gradational boundary in central or south-central North America. Since it has been over three decades since the WIS community zonation hypothesis has been investigated for vertebrates, new information including recent radiometric age determinations, taxonomic revisions, additional fossil discoveries, and recently available online museum specimen catalogues allow for testing of the community zonation hypothesis using an updated dataset. Community percent similarities were calculated between time-averaged, lithostratigraphic unit faunal assemblages of the Manitoba escarpment and other WIS localities using Percent Similarity coefficients calculated from relative abundance data as well as Sorensen’s Coefficients of Communities calculated from presence-absence data on the generic and species levels for comparisons. Additionally, nine time bins were used to represent nine Upper Cretaceous lithostratigraphic units of the Manitoba escarpment to test the zonation hypothesis consistency for nearly the entire Late Cretaceous time interval (~71-95 Ma). Relatively high genus-level community similarity values (25-50%) of south-central WIS localities and low values (
Published Version
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