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Paleoecological Approaches to Analyzing Stratigraphic Sequences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

Robyn J. Burnham*
Affiliation:
Department of Botany KB-15, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195
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Extract

Stratigraphic successions provide basic data on past changes in the biosphere. The fossil record may reflect climatic, evolutionary or ecosystem alterations. Careful analysis of Mesozoic and Cenozoic stratigraphic sequences has provided a clearer picture of the diversity of early angiosperms (Doyle, 1978, 1984; Doyle and Hickey, 1976; Crane et al., 1986), their environments of deposition (Hickey and Doyle, 1977), the nature of plant response to Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary events (Wolfe, 1987), the changes in angiosperm fruit and seed sizes as correlated with the increase in forest dominance and changes in dispersal mode over time (Tiffney, 1984, 1986; Wing and Tiffney, 1987), and changes in floristic and physiognomic forest compositions correlated with climatic fluctuations (Leopold and MacGinitie, 1972; Wolfe, 1978, 1981b).

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Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 Paleontological Society 

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