Stratigraphy and dinosaur palaeontology of the Wealden Group, Isle of Wight

怀特岛的威尔登群由早白垩世沉积的河流和浅海地层组成。威尔登的洪泛平原和海滩是多种恐龙的家园，包括甲龙、食鱼棘龙和长着大拇指的禽龙。威尔登恐龙是英国历史上最著名、种类最多的恐龙。相比之下，沉积物还没有在现代技术和分析的背景下进行研究。因此，沉积环境特征不明显，缺乏详细的年代地层学。这阻碍了了解恐龙的进化和古生态学的尝试，因为它们不能准确地定位在时间上，而且它们生活和死亡的环境并不总是清晰的。该项目的目的是研究怀特岛威尔登地区恐龙遗骸的出现、沉积相和年代地层之间的关系。威尔登群沉积环境的工作概念模型是一个不局限于山谷的河流系统，并受到显著的海洋影响。通过威尔登群，沉积相表明，河流系统逐渐被海平面上升淹没。我们要测试的就是这个概念模型；我们将研究海平面波动的模式和海洋影响增加的趋势是否可以通过演替向上识别。这些研究将通过对全岛河流元素的相分析来进行。这项工作的高潮将是怀特威尔登岛的第一个年代地层框架。然后，我们将在岛上找到恐龙的出现地点，并发现某些分类群是否可以与沉积序列相关联，从而确定古环境背景。这些见解将使我们能够检查化石记录中的保存偏见，这些偏见可能会阻碍我们对恐龙多样性和分布的理解，并预测可能的未来地点。最后，我们将把恐龙的出现映射到我们的年代地层框架上，并试图评估特定恐龙是否被隔离在特定的时间片上，以表征恐龙的进化，并为恐龙分类和多样性的分析提供信息。

The Wealden Group of the Isle of Wight comprises fluvial and shallow marine strata deposited during the Early Cretaceous. The floodplains and beaches of the Wealden were home to a diversity of dinosaurs including the armoured ankylosaurs, the fish-eating spinosaurs, and the thumb-spiked iguanodontians. The Wealden dinosaurs are the best-known and most diverse from any time period in the UK. In contrast, the sediments have not been studied in the context of modern techniques and analyses. Consequently, depositional environments are poorly characterized, and a detailed chronostratigraphy is lacking. This hinders attempts to understand the evolution and palaeoecology of the dinosaurs, because they cannot be placed accurately in time, and the environments in which they lived and died are not always clear.The aim of this project is to examine the relationships between the occurrence of dinosaur remains, sedimentary facies, and chronostratigraphy in the Wealden of the Isle of Wight. The working conceptual model of the depositional setting for the Wealden Group is a river system that was not confined to a valley, and to significant marine influence. Through the Wealden Group, sedimentary facies indicate that the river system was gradually flooded by a rising sea level. It is this conceptual model that we look to test; we will examine whether patterns of sea level fluctuation and a tendency of increased marine influence can be recognised upwards through the succession. Such studies will be carried out through facies analysis of fluvial elements across the island. The culmination of this work will be the first chronostratigraphic framework for the Isle of Wight Wealden.We will then locate dinosaur occurrences across the island and discover if certain taxa can be correlated to a depositional sequence, hence palaeoenvironmental setting. Such insights will allow us to examine preservational biases in the fossil record that might be hindering our understanding of dinosaur diversity and distribution and predict possible future sites. Finally, we will map dinosaur occurrences onto our chronostratigraphic framework and attempt to assess whether specific dinosaurs were isolated to specific timeslices, to characterize dinosaur evolution and inform analyses of dinosaur taxonomy and diversity.