Matt Vrazo

The Food Trust

The fluvial facies of the Catskill Formation record important ecological events that occurred during Late Devonian time. A well-exposed section between the towns of Blossburg and Covington, in north-central Pennsylvania, contains abundant macrofossils and sedimentary features, making it well-suited for linking Upper Devonian fossil occurrences with...

We describe a new stylonurid eurypterid from the evaporitic potassium-salt deposits of the Upper Devonian (Famennian) Soligorsk Formation in the Pripyat Trough of Belarus. All specimens are assigned to Soligorskopterus tchepeliensis new genus new species, which represents the first formally described eurypterid species from Belarus. The occurrence...

Recent studies of eurypterid paleoecology suggest that formation of eurypterid Lagerstätten in the mid-Paleozoic of Laurentia was controlled by the presence of an ecological–taphonomic window that recurred predictably in nearshore, marginal environments during transgressions. We tested this hypothesis by performing a high-resolution taxonomic, envi...

The Middle Silurian Shawangunk Formation crops out in the lower Hudson Valley and extends toward the southwest into New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It reaches a maximum thickness around Guymard (1,400 ft.; 400m) and gradually thins toward the northeast, pinching out near Binnewater, New York. The formation consists of gray conglomerate, quartz arenite...

Konservat-Lagerstätten are increasingly being shown to be predictable within a sequence stratigraphic framework. In this study, we hypothesize that formation of eurypterid Lagerstätten in the mid-Paleozoic of Laurentia was controlled by an ecological-taphonomic window that recurred predictably in nearshore, marginal environments during transgressio...

Chitinous remains of arthropods have been shown to retain their original elemental composition in the fossil record, but the paleoecological utility of these compounds is unknown. In this study, we test for the first time the integrity of stable carbon isotope signatures (δ13C) in the organic remains of Mesozoic-age fossil decapod arthropod cuticle...

Eurypterids are generally rare in the fossil record, but occasionally occur in abundance. The genus Eurypterus, in particular, is well known from certain upper Silurian Lagerstätten of the northern Appalachian basin (New York and Ontario), but occurs far less frequently in the central and southern Appalachian basin (Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West...

The eurypterids (Arthropoda: Chelicerata), some of the earliest arthropods to undertake amphibious excursions onto land, are generally rare in the fossil record, but are sometimes found in great abundance, for example in the Late Silurian Bertie Group of New York State. The mass-moult-mate hypothesis has been proposed to explain such occurrences, w...

Evidence of tetrapods is scarce in the early Mississippian. Following Romer's Gap, a time of some 15 million years at the beginning of the Mississippian when remains of tetrapods and other continental organisms are rare, only sporadic skeletal and footprint fossils are found. We report here on new specimens of the tetrapod ichnogenera Hylopus and P...