Temporal distribution of piperocks in Cambrian and Ordovician： A coevolutionary process with changes of paleoenvironment

Piperock, a kind of characteristic ichnofabrics in Phanerozoic, was thought to decline gradually from Cambrian to Ordovician. A new compilation on the occurrences of the Cambrian and Ordovician piperocks of China and the world shows that piperocks generally flourished in Cambrian and declined in Ordovician, but a sharp decrease occurred during Middle and Late Cambrian. The case-study on the piperocks from the Lower-Middle Ordovician Hongshiya Formation at Dabaochang of Qiaojia, northern Yunnan Province, Southwest China indicates that the forming and preservation of piperocks were controlled by the deposition- al environment, the intensities of predation, competition, bioturbation, and the contents of nutrition and oxygen in watermass. A careful study on the development of the Cambrian and Ordovician piperocks suggests that the decrease of nearshore si- liciclastic sediments and the low contents of oxygen and nutrition in the watermass may have contributed to the decline of piperocks in Middle and Late Cambrian.