Also known as L538, Lake Burrinjuck

Where: New South Wales, Australia (35.0° S, 148.6° E: paleocoordinates 17.2° S, 173.5° E)

• coordinate estimated from map

When: Taemas Limestone Formation, Emsian (407.6 - 393.3 Ma)

• The uppermost unit below the Hatchery Creek Formation consists of very thin bedded white limestones, many beds being only 1 mm thick. The unit is c. 69 m thick. Some crossbedding is present. The rocks are interpreted as an intertidal zone carbonate deposit, which is consistent with the fact that the overlying unit is the fresh water Hatchery Creek Formation. The limestone has few invertebrate macrofossils, but ptyctodont tooth plates are occasionally present. Immediately beneath this unit are three strata consisting of interbedded limestones and shales. These contain few macrofossils, but occasionally they have a few ptyctodonts. Together these three units are c. 58 m thick. Our specimen comes from c. 40 m below the top of the limestone beneath the above mentioned three units, near the locality listed as by Pedder et al. (1970) as L538 at the northern end of the Taemas limestone outcrop. This lower limestone is different in kind from those lying above it, being a dark grey colour, often nodular, and in units some centimetres thick. It was deposited in an environment which supported a rich marine life. The commonest fossils are the thamnoporoid and favositid tabulates associated with an abundant ceroid syringoporoid probably related to Romeripora (Hill & Jell, 1970). The corals are all rolled and show a variety of shapes, indicating that at least during the final depositional event, a rough water environment existed. The rugosans have been described by Pedder in Pedder et al. (1970), and fig. 4 of that paper lists seven species of corals which are restricted to this level. Garratt & Wright (1989) have indicated that this unit belongs to their Coral Zone F. The conodonts were also described by Philip & Jackson in Pedder et al. (1970), and subsequent work outlined by Basden et al. (1999) indicates that they belong to the serotinus Zone of late Emsian age. Other fossils in the dipnoan bearing limestone include stromatoporoids and gastropods. Brachiopods are rare. The fossil site is c. 142 m beneath the Hatchery Creek Formation. One peculiarity of the occurrence is the fact that no other bone was found anywhere in the vicinity. In the Wee Jasper sequence, fragments of placoderms are commonly found near dipnoans, but prolonged searches at this locality failed to find bone of any kind. The locality is on the flank of the syncline of which the axis lies nearby. Hence the rocks have been subject to the cleavage which is common in the area, and the dipnoan specimen is somewhat distorted. Despite this the specimen restoration is not badly deformed.

• bed-level stratigraphic resolution

Environment/lithology: peritidal; lithified carbonate

Size class: macrofossils

Primary reference: K. S. W. Campbell and R. E. Barwick. 1999. A new species of the Devonian lungfish Dipnorhynchus from Wee Jasper, New South Wales. Records of the Australian Museum 51:123-140 [G. Lloyd/G. Lloyd]more details

Purpose of describing collection: taxonomic analysis

PaleoDB collection 196715: authorized by Graeme Lloyd, entered by Graeme Lloyd on 02.10.2018

Creative Commons license: CC BY (attribution)