PI will recover important geochronological and paleoenvironmental information for a suite of ~50 Paleocene vertebrate fossil localities in the Nanxiong Basin of south China that are rapidly being destroyed due to high rates of agricultural and urban development. Given the accelerating development in this part of south China and the imminent retirement of the scientists who originally discovered these fossil localities, this proposal meets a key criterion for SGER funding - it has a severe urgency with regard to availability of, or access to data, facilities or specialized equipment. Magnetostratigraphic and chemostratigraphic methods will be applied to Paleocene deposits in the Nanxiong Basin to answer two fundamental questions. (1) Do the major biotic turnovers that mark the boundaries between Paleocene Asian land mammal ages coincide in time with the major turnovers that mark the boundaries between Paleocene North American land mammal ages? (2) Do the Paleocene Asian land mammal age boundaries correlate to episodes of regional or global environmental change? This project will strengthen international collaborations between Chinese and American paleontologists, which is particularly important given the excellent vertebrate fossil records on each continent and the biogeographic connections that Asia and North America have shared during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic.
