Madygen trace fossil paper

Voigt, S. and D. Hoppe. 2010. Mass Occurrence of Penetrative Trace Fossils in Triassic Lake Deposits (Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia). Ichnos 17:1-11. [Link]

Besides the exquisite soft body preservation of insects and tetrapods within some parts of the lacustrine succession, the Triassic Madygen lake shows a rich inventary of invertebrate trace fossils, studied by my colleague from Freiberg Sebastian Voigt.

The interesting point about these ichnofossil assemblages is that they demonstrate a certain differentiation of the lake ground in better and less well aerated zones, displaying different degrees of bioturbation and abundances of indicative ichnotaxa.

You can imagine that fresh water lake grounds only became inhabited stepwise after the conquest of land by animals, so these trace fossil assemblages mark a certain evolutionary level of lake ecosystems, otherwise rarely documented in detail from the Middle to Late Triassic.