Lower Permian Terrestrial Paleoenvironments and Vertebrate Paleoecology of the Tambach Basin (Thuringia, Central Germany): The Upland Holy Grail

TLDR: The fossil-vertebrate assemblage shares many taxa in common with others that are well-documented from North America, but is atypical in the: (1) unusually large abundance of the terrestrial herbivore Diadectes; (2) complete absence of aquatic and semi-aquatic vertebrates; and (3) rarity of medium-to-large carnivorous synapsids.

Abstract: The Bromacker section of the Lower Permian, Tambach Formation, in central Germany, yields an important fossil-vertebrate assemblage that was deposited in an upland setting near the center of a small, internally-drained paleo-graben. The fossil-vertebrate assemblage shares many taxa in common with others that are well-documented from North America, but is atypical in the: (1) unusually large abundance of the terrestrial herbivore Diadectes; (2) complete absence of aquatic and semi-aquatic vertebrates; and (3) rarity of medium-to-large carnivorous synapsids. The graben setting and the low-diversity, terrestrial, fossil-vertebrate assemblage together comprise a unique upland paleoecosystem, heretofore undocumented in the Early Permian. The composition of and relative abundances within the assemblage at Bromacker suggest that experiments with “high-fiber” vertebrate herbivores as the dominant or significant basal component of vertebrate food webs had begun by the Early Permian, but only in settings w...