Radioisotopic and biostratigraphic constraints on the classical Middle-Upper Permian succession and tetrapod fauna of the Moscow syneclise, Russia

Abstract

© 2020 Geological Society of America. The East European Platform and the PreUrals are the regions where the Permian System was first established, but the provincialism of fossils and lack of radioisotopic age control have prevented the use there of the regional Permian subdivisions used outside of the region. We report the first U-Pb zircon chemical abrasion-isotope dilution-thermal ionization mass spectrometry (CA-ID-TIMS) age of 253.95 0.06 Ma for a volcanic tuff from the terrestrial upper part of the lower Vyatkian Regional Stage in the Moscow syneclise (Russia). This age greatly improves the correlation of the East European Platform and the PreUrals with the international geologic time scale, and contributes to our understanding of sedimentation within the Permian-Triassic transition in the studied region. The new radioisotopic age integrated within the regional chronostratigraphic framework reveals the synchrony in extinction of faunas of the Dinocephalian superassemblage in the studied region with that in South Africa.