Abstract
Stromatolites are usually regarded as organo-sedimentary structures seldom preserving the organisms responsible for their formation. The interpretation of fossil stromatolites as being produced by the trapping and binding of sediment by micro-organisms, particularly blue-green algae, is essentially based on examination of Recent living stromatolite surfaces. Yet some stromatolites do contain abundant calcified filaments and consequently show distinctive differences in internal structure from ‘normal’ stromatolites. I propose to term them skeletal stromatolites and skeletal oncolites, defined briefly as: stromatolites in which the organisms responsible for their formation are commonly preserved as calcified fossils. ‘Normal’ stromatolites, in which the micro-organisms are not calcified, are termed nonskeletal stromatolites.
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© 1977 Springer-Verlag Berlin · Heidelberg
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Riding, R. (1977). Skeletal Stromatolites. In: Flügel, E. (eds) Fossil Algae. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-66516-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-66516-5_4
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