Australia Riversleigh and major update (Kenny and Christine)

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The new Australian coordinator Kenny T promised to suggest how to approach revising Riversleigh

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indre.zliobaite Apr 3, 2023 2:28 PM
Christine is coming to Helsinki in May, will see.

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indre.zliobaite Jan 22, 2023 1:54 PM
New sources from Kenny

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indre.zliobaite Oct 23, 2019 3:37 PM
Hi Kenny,

Thanks! This is a good question. Technically, the NOW database allows
either kind. The Faunal Zones of Riversleigh would be recognised as
"general localities", something primarily used for old collections
that predate the later spatial and stratigraphic refinement. Most
classic localities (Samos, Olduvai, etc.) have this kind and I've no
doubt you have such material for Riversleigh as well. Type specimens
from the early days of palaeontology are almost always referable only
to such general localities.

Scientifically, the individual localities are preferable for several
reasons, including aspects of data analysis. And of course you can
always aggregate afterwards, whereas undoing the aggregates is very
hard to do.

For North America we actually have aggregates similar to your
(spatially local) Faunal Zones, which means that when we find
interesting differences between North America and Eurasia (for
example) we always have to think hard about whether they could be due
to different levels of data aggregation. What we don't accept as
localities is temporal aggregates with more than local extent, for
example country-wide zonations.

It's of course also a matter of practicality and ultimately down to
the coordinator in charge, in this case you. You have the best
knowledge and overview to decide. If you'd like to discuss you can
tell us more, for example how far apart the individual localities are
and how widely spaced in time.

Cheers!

Mikael

On Thu, 5 Sep 2019 at 05:26, Kenny Travouillon
Kenny.Travouillon@museum.wa.gov.au wrote:

Hi,

Actually, when I started, Riversleigh was a single site in the database, and I managed to split it into the 4 Faunal Zones. Are you expecting all the Riversleigh sites to be added, rather than the Riversleigh Faunal Zones? There are over 300 sites at Riversleigh, and most haven't been dated or associated to a Faunal Zone, so I am not so keen to go down to site specifics. Are you happy with just the 4 Faunal Zones?

Kind regards,

Dr Kenny J. Travouillon CF
Curator of Mammalogy / Chair of Australasian Palaeontologists
Terrestrial Zoology

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Riversleigh Species presence Data.xlsx
Archer et al., 2006 (better version).pdf
Klinkhamer & Godthelp 2015 Two new species of fossil Leggadina from NW Qld. PeerJ.pdf