Terrestrial Palaeoecology and Global Change

Chapter 3. Palaeoecology
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Palaeosol from a dinosaur locality in the Maastrichtian of Nemegt Basin, Mongolia is
preserved as a thin, light brown with yellow ferruginous spots, clayey film on laminated
alluvial siltstone. It contains horizontal roots of aquatic macrophytes and a mycelium of
dense hyphal strands. A group of fruiting bodies attached to the mycelium show radially
split exoperidia, as in the modern saprophytic gasteromycetes of the earthstar genus
Gaestrum (Fig. 28). Mycelial films might have contributed to incipient soil development
on detritic levee deposits.
Pollen grains in the gut compressions of fossil insects reflect pollen sources within a
flight distance, not too vast in large pollinivorous insects. If two or more pollen types are
mixed in the guts, they are most likely to have been produced by plants that grew side by
side. Pollen extracted from gut compressions of several insects species of the Permian
Tschekarda locality, Cisuralia mostly belong to the taeniate types (Fig. 29) Among them,
Lunatisporites, produced by Ullmannia and allied coniferoids, is abundant in the guts of
two large insects, a hypoperlid Idelopsocus diratiatus, and a book-louse Parapsocidi-
Fig. 28. Fossil soil of a dinosaur locality from the Maastrichtian of Nemegt Basin, Mongolia, with a
saprophytic fungus allied to the extant earth-star genus Gaestrum: root-like mycelial strands and a group of
fruiting bodies, one showing a radially split exoperidium (arrow and enlarged).