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The Fossil, the Dead, the Living: Beach Death Assemblages and Molluscan Biogeography of the Uruguayan Coast

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Actualistic Taphonomy in South America

Part of the book series: Topics in Geobiology ((TGBI,volume 48))

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Abstract

Shelly death assemblages are major sources of information for Actualistic Taphonomy studies. They preserve a sample, often biased, of the living communities, provide biostratinomic evidence useful for taphonomic analyses, allow one to establish shell time averaging and residence time, and are valuable resources in conservation paleobiology studies. Besides these paleontologically related approaches, death assemblages have traditionally been a source for species records in a given location or area. Although a species’ geographic range should be established through the collection of living specimens, there are numerous records in the literature based on dead shells from beaches. For the Uruguayan coast, there are some examples of this situation, and they are especially important when considering distributional endpoints. One cause that accounts for dead shells on a beach is the reworking of fossiliferous deposits. Increased knowledge about Uruguayan Quaternary marine deposits can provide explanations for why some species are found in modern beach death assemblages. For example, the bivalve Anomalocardia flexuosa has been recorded in several Quaternary outcrops, and its shells have been found on modern beaches, but no living specimens have been recorded on the Uruguayan coast. A shell collected from the Parque del Plata beach (Canelones county) yielded an accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon age of circa 6,600 years before present (BP), a finding that suggests that the dated shell came from a nearby Holocene deposit. This contribution provides an insight for future research that integrates information from Quaternary and modern marine death assemblages to discuss the molluscan biogeography of the Uruguayan coast.

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Acknowledgements

We deeply thank Juan Carlos Zaffaroni for his comments on alien molluscan species found on Uruguayan beaches, and for his help in the identification of the M. annulus specimen.

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  1. Departamento de Paleontología, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de la República, Iguá 4225, 11400, Montevideo, Uruguay

    Alejandra Rojas & Sergio Martínez

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  1. Alejandra Rojas
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Correspondence to Alejandra Rojas .

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  1. Departamento de Paleontología, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay

    Sergio Martínez

  2. Departamento de Paleontología, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay

    Alejandra Rojas

  3. Departamento de Paleontología, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay

    Fernanda Cabrera

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Rojas, A., Martínez, S. (2020). The Fossil, the Dead, the Living: Beach Death Assemblages and Molluscan Biogeography of the Uruguayan Coast. In: Martínez, S., Rojas, A., Cabrera, F. (eds) Actualistic Taphonomy in South America. Topics in Geobiology, vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20625-3_2

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