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Late Cambrian Fossils and the Age of the Ross Orogeny, Antarctica

Abstract

ONE of the unsolved geological problems of East Antarctica has been the age of the folded sediments and metasediments unconformably underlying the near horizontal late Palaeozoic and early Mesozoic Beacon Supergroup of Victoria Land (Fig. 1). The known occurrence of trace fossils, including Ruzophycus, indicates a Phanerozoic and probably Cambrian age for at least the uppermost part of the folded sequence1. The discovery of late Cambrian body fossils in the upper part of this sequence establishes, for the first time, a definite minimum age for the succession and enables correlation with early Phanerozoic sequences elsewhere in Antarctica.

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LAIRD, M., ANDREWS, P., KYLE, P. et al. Late Cambrian Fossils and the Age of the Ross Orogeny, Antarctica. Nature 238, 34–36 (1972). https://doi.org/10.1038/238034a0

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