Eocene (Lutetian) Shark-Rich Coastal Paleoenvironments of the Southern North Sea Basin in Europe: Biodiversity of the Marine Fürstenau Formation Including Early White and Megatooth Sharks
The Fürstenau Formation (Lutetian, Paleogene, Eocene) is based on type sections near Fürstenau in Germany (central Europe) and is built of 22 meter thick marine glauconitic and strongly bioturbated sands, clays, and a vertebrate-rich conglomerate bed. The conglomerate layer from the Early Lutetian transgression reworked Lower Cretaceous, and Paleogene marine sediments. It is dominated by pebbles from the locally mountains which must have been transported by an ancient river in a delta fan. Marine reworked Lower Cretaceous and Paleogen pebbles/fossils, were derived from the underlying deposits of northern Germany (= southern pre North Sea basin). The benthic macrofauna is cold upwelling water influenced and non-tropical, and medium divers. The vertebrate fish fauna is extremely rich in shark teeth, with about 5,000 teeth per cubic meter of gravel. The most dominant forms are teeth from sand shark ancestors Striatolamia macrota, followed by white shark ancestors Carcharodon auriculatus. Even teeth from the magatooth shark ancestor Carcharocles sokolovi are present in a moderately diverse and condensed Paleogene fish fauna that also includes rays, chimaeras, and more then 80 different bony fish. Fragmentary turtle remains are present, and few terrestrial vertebrates and even marine mammals with phocids, sirenians and possibly whales. 1. Introduction Early research in the Dalum fossil locality in the Fürstenau region of north-west Germany (Figure 1(a)) concentrated largely on the stratigraphy and the fossil shark tooth content [1]. A preliminary analysis of the conglomerate components has also been published by Bartholom？us [2]. The site has only been excavated by private collectors, who have been active there since 1971 [2]. Whereas aragonite and calcite fossils at Dalum have all been dissolved away, they are still preserved in a sand pit at Osteroden (Figure 1(b)) from which 11,000 fish otoliths have previously been analysed by Schwarzhans [3]. The extremely rare teeth of terrestrial mammals from the Dalum and Osteroden sites were the focus of a paper by Franzen and M？rs [4]. Figure 1: (a) The Dalum site near Fürstenau and (b) the Osteroden sand pit near Bippen, in north-western Germany. (c) Paleogeography of important Eocene marine and terrestrial vertebrate fossil sites of Europe (compiled from [ 4, 5, 9– 14]). The Paleogene (Middle Eocene) marine localities at Dalum and Osteroden (Figures 1(a) and 1(b)), in the southern pre-North Sea basin, represent an important environmental bridge between marine, coastal, deltaic swamp, and terrestrial faunas
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