Biodiversity crisis and recovery during the Triassic-Jurassic greenhouse interval: testing ocean acidification hypotheses ...

• Main Author: Jacobsen, Nikita Danielle
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Plymouth University 2014
• Subjects: Marine Palaeontology; Ocean Acidification; Triassic; Jurassic; Biodiversity Crisis; Ostracods; Bivalves; Palaeotemperature; pCO2 data; Lyme Regis; St Audrie's Bay; PhD; Ocean acidification
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.24382/1761; https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/10026.1/9329

The Late Rhaetian (Late Triassic) extinction event is characterised by shelled species showing a reduction in size, and thickness, which together with changed mineralogy is thought to be as a result of increased atmospheric pCO2 levels. Similar morphological changes have been demonstrated for extant species exposed experimentally to high CO2 leading to the hypothesis that Late Triassic extinctions were linked with global ocean acidification and increased oceanic palaeotemperatures. Consequently, the aim of this present work was to test this ocean acidification hypothesis by investigating morphological changes in selected shelled fossil species across this extinction event, and attempt to correlate them with changes in environmental temperature and pCO2. The abundance, size, shell thickness and mineralogy was determined for three common species, the bivalves Liostrea hisingeri and Plagiostoma gigantea and the ostracod Ogmoconchella aspinata collected from Triassic and Jurassic rocks from two locations in ...