Urumaco and Venezuelan Paleontology: The Fossil Record of the Northern Neotropics

Preface

ix Preface My co-editors and I had originally asked Rick Madden to write a preface to this book. I wrote an email to Rick and told him the subject of the book was the Venezuelan fossil record, and that it would be nice if he were to write some words about paleontology in South America. Rick Madden has made major contributions and led studies in the northern neotropics for decades. He answered with the text quoted here. His essay never materialized because of my sometimes poor organizational skills, but his statement I think provides a good introduction to this preface. To me, it expresses the excitement and potential that working in that part the world entails, as much as the frustration and continuous contrasts in all spheres that come together with that work. Venezuela is one of the megadiverse countries of the planet, and studies of its existing flora and fauna go back most prominently to the expedition of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Studies of the Venezuelan fossil fauna and flora, however , never had their Humboldt. George Gaylord Simpson (1902–1984) is the only major figure in vertebrate paleontology to have worked in the country, and he and Bryan Patterson from Harvard conducted only short visits to Venezuela. Vertebrate paleontology in Venezuela is still largely a promise, but I hope that some of the past and current efforts summarized and reported in this book make a good start. Other areas of the fossil record of Venezuela have been the subject of important studies. I am particularly pleased that Valentí Rull agreed to contribute on two subjects of importance to the understanding of past and current Venezuelan biodiversity. The Tepui region of Guyana in southern Venezuela was the subject of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel Lost World, and many decades later was the subject of pioneering studies on biogeography based on avifaunal studies by the renowned evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr (1904–2005). The Pleistocene paleoecology discussed by Rull and colleagues is a fundamental area to understand the living megadiversity of Venezuela. The oil-richness of Venezuela has made Venezuelan geology and paleoecology a fundamental and necessary subject of study. However, the closer we look at many regions, the more we realize how extensive our lack of knowledge is. Some of the chapters here I hope indicate future areas of study. The contribution by Quiróz and Jaramillo represents a first synthesis of new and fundamental stratigraphic information to understand the paleoenvironmental and geological context in which the richest faunal record of vertebrates occurs in Venezuela, the Urumaco sequence. P Vast warehouses full of oil well cores unstudied by paleontologists of plant phytoliths, deep accumulation of the erosional products of Andean uplift and unroofing, extraordinary history of fluvial systems carrying the incredible quantities of silt and bed load in hydraulic dynamism, dramatically escalating orographic effects on rainfall, Quaternary climate oscillations polarizing erosional regimes producing almost unimaginable consequences for biota for which we have only brief glimpses, glacial and tectonic induced sea-level fluctuations influencing an extensive lowland, a necessary but defective uniformitarian tradition that seems to stultify rather than stimulate, meagre data on the ecology and diets of most living mammal species, segregated high Andean and tropical lowland biotas with a very narrow and inaccessible geographic transition hidden in extreme topography and rainfall. . . . This kind of thing? Richard H. Madden, Fall 2008 x Preface I am well aware of the contrasting smallness of this edited book to the largeness of the topic of Venezuelan geological past. But this book provides a window on some of the topics of Venezuelan paleontology, and with that I hope it will stimulate more research. I hope there is the political and academic will to permit the necessary multidisciplinary and international collaborations to conduct this research. Too many topics are not treated in this book, but it could not be otherwise , as Venezuela is a country rich in geology and past biodiversity, and many skilled people have worked and work currently in Venezuela. The pre-Cenozoic record we had treated in other recent publications. Several colleagues have made significant contributions in the study of mollusks, for example, and I suspect that the rich information collected on Venezuelan fossil Foraminifera from the times of Pedro Joaquín Bermudez (1905–79) up to today would be worth a rich and informative synthesis. But there are some unexpected treatments in this book. Thanks to the continuous and systematic collection and synthesis...