(South Ern Po Land)? a Crit I Cal Over View of Stra Tig Ra Phy and Fa Cies
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Annales Societatis Geologorum Poloniae (2015), vol. 85: 587–626. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14241/asgp.2015.037 HOW MANY UPPER TRIAS SIC BONE-BEARING LEVELS ARE THERE IN UP PER SILESIA (SOUTHERN POLAND)? A CRIT I CAL OVER VIEW OF STRA TIG RA PHY AND FACIES Joachim SZULC1, Grzegorz RACKI2, 3, Karol JEWU£A1 & Jan ŒRODOÑ2 1 Insti tute of Geolog i cal Sciences, Jagiellonian Uni ver sity, Oleandry 2a, 30-063 Kraków, Poland; e-mail: [email protected] 2 In stitute of Geolog i cal Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences, Re search Centre in Kraków, Senacka 1, Kraków, Poland; e-mail: [email protected] 3 Faculty of Earth Sciences, Uni versity of Silesia, Bêdziñska 60, 41-200 Sosnowiec, Po land; e-mail: [email protected] Szulc, J., Racki, G., Jewu³a, K. & Œrodoñ, J., 2015. How many Upper Tri as sic bone-bear ing lev els are there in Up per Silesia (south ern Po land)? A crit i cal over view of stra tig ra phy and fa cies. Annales Societatis Geologorum Poloniae, 85: 587–626. Ab stract: At least three widely sep a rated bone-bear ing in ter vals in the Up per Tri as sic suc ces sion of Upper Silesia, ranging in age from the Carnian to Rhaetian (i.e., in the in ter val of 25 Ma), are pre sented in pa pers by the Warsaw re search group, led mainly by Jerzy Dzik and/or Grzegorz NiedŸwiedzki. The strati graphic ar guments are re viewed for the ver te brate lo cal i ties stud ied so far, in par tic u lar for the well-known middle Keuper sites at Krasiejów and Lipie Œl¹skie, to show that the pre vi ously pro posed age as sign ments are still in ad e quately doc u mented and ques tion able. This un re li abil ity is ex em pli fied by the evolv ing strati graphic cor re la tion of the frag men tary Silesian sec tions (8–18 m thick) with in for mal subsurface units from cen tral-west ern Po land and with the Ger man stan dard suc ces sion, ul ti mately not cor rob o rated by com par i son with the com pos ite ref er ence suc ces sion of the Up per Silesian Keuper, in clud ing new pro files (ca. 260 m thick) from the WoŸniki K1 and Patoka 1 wells. Based on a multidisciplinary strati graphic study cov er ing con sistent litho-, bio-, climato- and chemostratigraphic pre mises, fo cused on the re gional ref er ence sec tion, two bone-bed lev els only are rec og nized in the Patoka Marly Mudstone-Sand stone Member (= Steinmergelkeuper) of the Grabowa Forma tion, not very dif fer ent in age (Classopollis meyeriana Palynozone; prob a bly IVb Subzone): (1) the lo cal ized Krasiejów bone brec cia level (early Norian in age) in the Opole re gion, and (2) the far more widely dis trib uted Lisowice bone-bear ing level (middle Norian) in a vast al lu vial plain (braided to anastomosing river system) dur ing the Eo-Cim mer ian tec tonic-plu vial ep i sode. As a con se quence of the prin ci pal un cer tain ties and con tro ver sies in Up per Tri as sic ter res trial stra tig ra phy, this is still a some what pre lim i nary in fer ence. Typ i cal skel e tal con cen tra - tions of a com bined hy drau lic/sedimentologic type, re lated to flu vial pro cesses, are common in the Up per Silesian Fos sil-Lagerstätten, al though fac tors gov ern ing pres er va tion are prob a bly im por tant, as well. Key words: Bone beds, lithostratigraphy, palynostratigraphy, chemostratigraphy, taphonomy, Grabowa For ma- tion, mid dle Keuper, Upper Silesia. Manu script re ceived 25 Au gust 2015, ac cepted 9 De cem ber 2015 IN TRO DUC TION The Tri as sic, as the pe riod between the two great ex tinc - 2010; com pare Szulc, 2007c). The tetrapod local ities have tions, was char ac ter ized by the sub stan tial re con struc tion of major cogni tive impor tance for the evolu tion of many im - con ti nen tal tetrapod com mu ni ties (Benton, 2004). Af ter the portant groups of am phibi ans and reptiles (Dzik et al., 2000, discov ery of very rich bone accu mu lations in southern Po- 2008a; Dzik and Sulej, 2007; Sulej and NiedŸwiedzki, land at Krasiejów vil lage, near the town of Ozimek, and at 2010; NiedŸwiedzki, 2012; NiedŸwiedzki et al., 2014), and Lisowice vil lage (Lipie Œl¹skie clay pit), near the town of even mam mals (Œwi³o et al., 2014). Accord ingly, it seems Lubliniec (Dzik et al., 2000, 2008a, 2008b), a new and at - hard to over es timate the im por tance of the Silesian ‘grave- trac tive sci en tific per spec tive sur pris ingly emerged for pre - yards’ with refer ence to the study of Late Trias sic evo lu - viously abandoned studies of the Polish Keuper (Racki, tion ary patterns, exem pli fied by the still obscure dawn of di - 588 J. SZULC ET AL. A more com pre hen sive pre sen ta tion of var i ous geo log i cal, sedimentological, geo chem i cal and strati graphic as pects of the middle Keuper tetrapod local ities is given in a regional context by Œrodoñ et al. (2014), Szulc and Racki (2015), Szulc et al. (2015) and Fija³kowska-Mader et al. (2015). STRATI GRAPHIC AND FA CIES BACK GROUND The Upper Tri assic succes sion of Silesia belongs to the Keuper Group (Fig. 2), and, in palaeogeographic terms, cor- Fig. 1. A. Sche matic geo log i cal map (af ter Bardziñski and responds to the marginal part of the Germanic Basin (e.g., Chybiorz, 2013), showing the lo ca tions of the lo cal i ties stud ied in Beutler and Nitsch, 2005; Feist-Burkhardt et al., 2008; Upper Silesian re gion (out crops and bore holes; for de tail see Szulc Bachmann et al., 2010). Varie gated, fine-grained clastics et al., 2015), and B. lo ca tion of the stud ied re gion and the key and locally evaporites (mostly gyp sum pseudomorphs) and bore hole in Po land. carbon ates are the most com mon deposit type and the re- cords of ephem eral-lake and evolving flu vial sys tems devel - no saur devel op ment (see Dzik, 2003a; Dzik et al., 2008a; oped under mostly arid to semi-arid cli mate condi tions with Brusatte et al., 2010; Nesbitt et al., 2010; Irmis, 2011; Nie- some pluvial inter ludes (Pieñkowski, 1988; Szulc et al., 2006, dŸwiedzki et al., 2012, 2014; Benton et al., 2014), as well as 2015; Szulc, 2007a). the sup posed bi otic turn overs and biodiversity cri ses, espe - The largely mo noto nous and fos sil-poor mudstone- cially at the Carnian-Norian boundary (Benton, 2004; Pieñ- claystone suc ces sion, up to 400 m thick in northern Silesia kowski et al., 2014). and almost without more distinc tive marker hori zons, in its Dur ing 15 years of in ten sive in ves ti ga tion, five ver te- facies de vel op ment dif fers some what from the clas si cal Ger - brate sites in to tal have been de scribed across Silesia in the manic Keuper, in par ticu lar in the oc cur rence of the palu- Up per Tri as sic suc ces sion (Fig. 1), sup ple mented by one strine carbon ates of the WoŸniki Limestone (see Fig. 2), basal Keuper, though still Mid dle Tri as sic lo cal ity (Mie- a unique Keuper fa cies linked to a spring zone of deeply cir - dary; Sulej et al., 2011b; Fig. 2). Next, the bone-rich site re- culat ing groundwa ter that surfaces along the Kraków–Lubli- cently discov ered in 2014 in Zawiercie town was reported niec master frac ture (Szulc et al., 2006). Since the 19th by Rafa³ Piechowski (in Malinowska, 2015). Known since century, the mudstone-claystone rocks were in many places Römer’s (1867, 1870) papers, these rich fossil assem blages in small, local brickyards and thus they crop out in several of var ied tax o nomic com po si tion in clude both di verse scat tered clay pits. Strati graphic corre la tions of the pro files aquatic and ter res trial an i mals (?mam mals, rep tiles, amphi- in Up per Silesia are still un cer tain be cause of the pau city of bians, fishes; also bivalves and other vari ous inver te brates), available biostratigraphic data (see review in Bilan, 1991) as so ciated with al gae and vas cu lar plants (see Dzik and and the lack of any consis tent regional scheme of lithostrati- Sulej, 2007; Sulej et al., 2011a, 2012; NiedŸwiedzki et al., graphy with formally defined units (see Becker et al., 2008). 2014; Pieñkowski et al., 2014). The lithostratigraphic as- More over, the varied palaeotopography of the Silesian Keu- signment, age and, partly, depositional setting of the fossil- per basin, con trolled mostly by synsedimentary tecton ics, bearing depos its were more or less con jectural at most of the re sulted in ex treme lateral vari abil ity in facies across the ba - sites and quickly be came the subject of debate, ex em pli fied sin, which ad di tion ally hin ders cor re la tion.