FELLETTI F.

Barrier-islands are common landforms and biodiverse habitats, yet they received scarce neoichnological attention. This gap is tackled by studying the Mula di Muggia barrier-island system (Grado lagoon, Italy), focusing on morphology, ecology and ethology of individual traces. The following incipient ichnotaxa are identified: Archaeonassa,...

A new method is proposed for capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying geographically referenced ichnological data: IchnoGIS. This approach is based on the integration of spatial, geostatistical techniques with network theory, aiming to characterize the environmental significance of recent traces. The efficiency of the IchnoGIS method is...

The Arda River marine succession (Italy) is an excellent site to apply an integrated approach to paleoenvironmental reconstructions, combining the results of sedimentology, body fossil paleontology, and ichnology to unravel the sedimentary evolution of a complex marine setting in the frame of early Pleistocene climate change and tectonic...

Decapod crustaceans are among the most efficient ecosystemengineers of the Phanerozoic, but the path that led to their engineering success is poorly known. The Permian-Triassic continental succession of Nurra (early Cisuralian-early Middle Triassic; Sardinia, Italy) sheds light on this obscure subject, because it preserves the oldest (Roadian)...

The Italian Northern Apennines are acknowledged as the place where ichnology was born, but there is comparatively little work about their ichnological record. This study bridges this gap by describing two new ichnosites from the locality of Pierfrancesco, which preserve an abundant, low-disparity trace-fossil assemblage within the Late...

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Species of burrowing animals have changed substantially over evolutionary time scales, but, surprisingly, burrows display persisting morphological patterns throughout the Phanerozoic. Deep-sea burrows are geometrically patterned, whereas shallow-marine burrows display simpler morphologies. This divergence between burrow associations is one of...

The Pramollo Basin (Italy-Austria) is one of the richest body and trace fossil sites of the Alps, and exhibits a well-preserved Permian- Carboniferous fluvio-deltaic to marginalmarine sedimentary succession. Despite the exceptionally abundant and well-preserved ichnological heritage, the trace fossils of the Pramollo Basin are not well studied,...

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Organism-substrate interactions and their products – biogenic structures – are important biosignatures on Earth. This study discusses the application of ichnology – the study of organism-substrate interactions – to the search for present and past life beyond Earth. Three main questions are addressed: (1) Why to look for biogenic structures...