Abstract
As a richly fossiliferous bone bed with over 350 bones from a single taxon, Roehler’s Coryphodon Catastrophe Quarry (RCCQ) in the Washakie Basin of Wyoming is an intriguing paleontological phenomenon. Coryphodon was a large bodied, subdigitigrade, graviportal herbivorous browser that first appeared in North America in the latest Paleocene (Clarkforkian Land Mammal Age) and was ubiquitous in early Eocene terrestrial faunas (Lucas, 1984). It is suggested that RCCQ is a mass death accumulation, but that evidence for such an event is obscured by the overprint of at least one additional stage which intervened between the time of death and the time of final deposition. This paper draws on faunal, taphonomic, and sedimentologic evidence to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to formation of the RCCQ bone bed, and to ascertain the extent and degree of bias caused by successive modifications.
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McGee, E. (2001). A Mass Death Accumulation of Coryphodon anthracoideus (Mammalia: Pantodonta) at Roehler’s Coryphodon Catastrophe Quarry (Lower Eocene, Wasatch Formation), Washakie Basin, Wyoming. In: Gunnell, G.F. (eds) Eocene Biodiversity. Topics in Geobiology, vol 18. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1271-4_13
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