A New Approach in Determining the Age of Deep-Water Species of Scleractinia Using Temperature Ranges of Their Habitation

摘要

Until now, only occasional finds of corals in the continental mass have helped to determine the age of the deep-water scleractinians. As a result, we have chronological data only on the species that constitute less then ten percent of the existing fauna of those organisms. The majority of the species of nonzooxanthellate corals dwells deeper than the shelf zone, down to the abyssal plane, and cannot be found in the continental cross sections. Therefore, the authors have undertaken the first attempt to approach this issue not with the traditional biostatigraphic method, but from the standpoint of paleoecology. This new approach involved using data about the ocean water temperature in the geological past and the temperature ranges determined by the authors earlier for fifty-three coral species. Our studies have confirmed the suggestion that modern deep-water fauna is exceptionally young.