Waipara River (S68/319) (Cretaceous of New Zealand)

Where: South Island, New Zealand (43.1° S, 172.6° E: paleocoordinates 56.4° S, 153.8° W)

• coordinate based on nearby landmark

• outcrop-level geographic resolution

When: Conway Formation, Late/Upper Maastrichtian (70.6 - 66.0 Ma)

• The lithology was defined by Webb (1966) as the Laidmore Formation, a term also used in Welles and Gregg (1971). Later Warren and Speden (1978, p. 25) proposed that the Laidmore Formation be considered as a unit of the Conway Siltstone (Warren and Speden 1978); this was subsequently modified and published as the Conway Formation (Browne and Field 1985) and is now widely accepted as such (Wilson et al. 2005). The material was collected 6 m below the top of the Conway Formation. Wilson et al. (2005) extracted a sample from the matrix surrounding the holotype of P. waiparaensis and recorded a microflora dominated by taxa such as Manumiella seelandica (Lange, 1969), Manumiella druggii (Stover, 1973), Fibrocysta bipolaris (Cookson and Eisenack, 1965) and Alterbidinium longicornutum Roncaglia and Schiøler, 1997, an assemblage that confirms a late Maastrichtian age, close to the Cretaceous ⁄ Palaeogene boundary.

• bed-level stratigraphic resolution

Environment/lithology: offshore; lithified, glauconitic sandstone

• Microflora is one typical of nearshore, inner shelf environments. But barnacle preservation suggests that the environment was clearly of very low energy, conforming to that of glauconite accumulation in present-day marine settings.
• Cemented glauconitic greensand matrix

Size class: macrofossils

• Proximal end of a giant propodial and a medium size propodial

Collected by T. R. Withell in 1924; reposited in the CM

Collection methods: surface (in situ),

• CM Zfr, Canterbury Museum, Christchurch

Primary reference: S. P. Welles and D. R. Gregg. 1971. Late Cretaceous marine reptiles of New Zealand. Records of the Canterbury Museum 9(1):1-111 [M. Carrano/H. Street]more details

Purpose of describing collection: general faunal/floral analysis

PaleoDB collection 232396: authorized by Evangelos Vlachos, entered by Franco Aspromonte on 15.11.2023

Creative Commons license: CC BY (attribution)

Taxonomic list

Reptilia
 Plesiosauria - Elasmosauridae
Elasmosauridae indet. Cope 1869 elasmosaur
CM Zfr 98, medium size propodial
 Plesiosauria - Polycotylidae
Polycotylidae indet. Williston 1908 plesiosaur
CM Zfr 99, proximal end of a giant propodial