Peru Locality (Carboniferous of the United States)

Also known as Indian Cave Sandstone exposures

Where: Nemaha County, Nebraska (40.5° N, 95.7° W: paleocoordinates 0.7° S, 26.9° W)

• coordinate based on nearby landmark

• outcrop-level geographic resolution

When: Indian Cave Sandstone Member (Onaga Formation), Gzhelian (303.7 - 298.9 Ma)

• The Indian Cave Sandstone, an informal unit, has been recently reinterpreted as a series of disjunct incised valley fills from the upper Pennsylvanian of southeastern Nebraska and Kansas (Fischbein et al., 2009); the Peru exposures represent an incised valley fill in the uppermost Pennsylvanian Towle Shale Member of the Onaga Formation (Admire Group).

• group of beds-level stratigraphic resolution

Environment/lithology: estuary or bay; lithified sandstone

• The highly disarticulated nature of the tetrapod fossils indicates some transport within the basin. The vertebrate fauna was surveyed by Ossian (1974), who interpreted the fauna as a largely autochthonous estuarine or nearshore marine assemblage dominated by actinopterygians and chondrichthyans, with frequent occurrences of disarticulated (probably transported) terrestrial material preserving isolated remains of lungfish as well as temnospondyls, lepospondyls, and amniotes, including Phlegethontia, Ophiderpeton, Diploceraspis, Diplocaulus, Dendrerpeton, Captorhinus, and indeterminate material dubiously attributed to dissorophids and ‘microsaurs.’
• The sediments include fine- to coarse-grained large-scale trough cross-bedded sandstones with silty and carbonaceous lenses bearing plant, invertebrate, and vertebrate remains, representing a transitional or estuarine paleoenvironment.

Size class: macrofossils

Collected by May et al. in 2009

Primary reference: W. May, A. K. Huttenlocker, J. D. Pardo, J. Benca, and B. J. Small. 2011. New Upper Pennsylvanian armored dissorophid records (Temnospondyli, Dissorophoidea) from the U.S. midcontinent and the stratigraphic distributions of dissorophids. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 31(4):907-912 [R. Butler/E. Dunne]more details

Purpose of describing collection: taxonomic analysis

PaleoDB collection 180631: authorized by Richard Butler, entered by Emma Dunne on 22.07.2016

Creative Commons license: CC BY (attribution)

Taxonomic list

Show authors, comments, and common names
Amphibia
 Temnospondyli - Dissorophidae
cf. Aspidosaurus sp.
cf. Aspidosaurus sp. Broili 1904 tetrapod
UWBM 95000