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One of the largest extinctions in Earth history occurred at the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary (c. 66 million years ago), when an asteroid impact (Renne et al., 2013), Deccan Trap volcanism (Renne et al., 2015) and associated environmental changed wiped out the non-bird dinosaurs and many other organisms. Most information on the causes, tempo and selectivity of the extinction in the continental realm comes from one part of the world; western North America, which boasts an excellent cross-boundary fossil record. However, in recent years, Europe has emerged as another potentially significant source of data regarding the extinction, but fully harvesting it hinges on the precise dating of the fossil record. Romania, with its remarkable fauna of dwarf dinosaurs, endemic primitive mammals, archaic crocodyliforms and giant pterosaurs that once lived on a tropical island along the northern margin of the Neo-Tethys, holds promise as its dinosaur-bearing continental deposits are interbedded with volcanic rocks (tuffs, lava flows) that are suitable for high-precision radio-isotopic dating.
This project aims to [1] map in detail the field relationships between the volcanic and sedimentary units, and to [2] date the volcanic rocks from the Transylvanian area (the Hațeg, Rusca Montană and Transylvanian basins in western Romania) using the 40Ar/39Ar method. The goal is to constrain the ages of the main vertebrate fossil-bearing successions and to place the different vertebrate assemblages within a robust, accurate and precise chronostratigraphic framework. Such an endeavour will allow identification of potential faunal evolutionary trends (e.g., changes in taxonomic composition, diversity and/or abundance, trends in morphological evolution or body size modifications) as the Transylvanian faunas approached the K-Pg boundary. Finally, the emergent data will be compared to, and integrated with, data from western Europe, North America and other parts of the world to paint a global picture of what occurred on land during the K-Pg extinction.