Steart, David Charles (2003) The fate of leaves in south eastern Australian terrestrial and aquatic environments: implications for taphonomic bias in the tertiary macrofossil record. PhD thesis, Victoria University of Technology.

Abstract

An understanding of the taphonomic processes that form and possibly bias plant fossil assemblages is of central importance to understanding and interpreting some of the anomalies in the Australian Cenozoic plant fossil record. This study measured a variety of ecosystem processes in contiguous Nothofagus cunninghamii (Hook) Oerst. dominated cool temperate rainforest and Eucalyptus regnans F.Muell. dominated wet sclerophyll forest in southeastern Australian forest in order to find an ecological explanation for anomalies between the poor macrofossil record on the one hand, and high abundance of one of these taxa as pollen. From the examination of these two forests three sources of taphonomic bias between taxa were identified: 1) bias between standing crop and leaf biomass production between species; 2) bias in overland and riparian leaf transportation distance between species; and 3) bias in decay rates between species.

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