Where: St. Lucie County, Florida (27.5° N, 80.5° W: paleocoordinates 27.5° N, 80.5° W)

• coordinate stated in text

• outcrop-level geographic resolution

When: Okeechobee Formation, Middle Pleistocene (0.8 - 0.1 Ma)

• The vertebrate fossil layer at DCP lies just below the Anastasia Formation and was the lowest stratum regularly exposed above water. While its lower boundary was not measured, this layer was only a few meters thick (Herrera et al., 2006). Electron spin resonance optical dating has confirmed these suspicions; a sample of siliciclastic sediments from just above the vertebrate fossil layer, at a depth of 11.5 m, was dated at 730-430 ka (0.73-0.43 Ma; Burdette et al., 2013). Strata below the vertebrate fossil layer occasionally were exposed at DCP. Petuch (2004) measured some sections and believed that these lower layers corresponded to the late Pliocene to early Pleistocene Nashua ‘formation.’ Burdette et al. (2013) dated a sample from those low layers (depth 14 m) at 1.37-0.61 Ma. If these age assessments are correct, then the fossil layer is certainly older than typical facies of the Anastasia Formation and should be included in Scott’s Okeechobee Formation.

Environment/lithology: mire or swamp; unlithified sandstone

Size class: macrofossils

Primary reference: J. A. Kilmer and D. W. Steadman. 2016. A middle Pleistocene bird community from Saint Lucie County, Florida. Bulletin of the Florida Museum of Natural History 55:1-38 [M. Clapham/M. Clapham]more details

Purpose of describing collection: general faunal/floral analysis

PaleoDB collection 195048: authorized by Matthew Clapham, entered by Matthew Clapham on 14.07.2018, edited by Mark Uhen

Creative Commons license: CC BY (attribution)