Palaeoecology of the Dinantian of Foulden, Berwickshire, Scotland

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Abstract
The Foulden Fish Bed was deposited in a semi-permanent brackish water lake on a floodplain between a northerly mountain range and the sea. The lake supported a rich biota mainly of swimming animals (fish and crustaceans) with a benthos of trace fossils only in the earlier and later stages of the lake's development. Xiphosurans are very rare. This biota changed according to the physical conditions of the lake. Salinity, fluctuating according to water level, was a dominant control. Early in the lake's history there was a dominant benthos of euryhaline bivalves; at the same time, large rhizodonts lived in the lake as the top carnivores. Subsequently, crustaceans were the dominant nektobenthos, in a probable brackish-water regime, the rare Bairdops preying on the common Belotelson; there was a limited infauna. Following this, palaeoniscids abound in the middle part of the sequence, perhaps due to a higher water level but crustaceans are absent at this horizon. During the last stages before final silting-up following a mass-mortality episode, biotic diversity reached a maximum with many fishes and crustaceans and some trace fossils, due to optimal salinity conditions.Comparisons are made with other Carboniferous biotas and with the Jurassic Solnhofen limestone.

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