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

怀特岛的韦尔登群包括早白垩世沉积的河流和浅海地层。韦尔登的洪泛平原和海滩是各种恐龙的家园，包括装甲甲龙、食鱼棘龙和拇指刺禽龙。威尔登恐龙是英国任何时期最著名和最多样化的恐龙。与此相反，沉积物尚未在现代技术和分析的背景下进行研究。因此，沉积环境的特点很差，详细的年代地层学是缺乏。由于恐龙化石的时间定位不准确，其生存和死亡的环境也不清楚，因此，对恐龙的进化和古生态学的研究受到了阻碍。本项目的目的是研究怀特岛韦尔登地区恐龙化石的出现、沉积相和年代地层学之间的关系。韦尔登群沉积环境的工作概念模型是一个河流系统，不局限于山谷，并受到重大的海洋影响。通过Wealden群，沉积相表明河流系统逐渐被海平面上升淹没。正是这个概念模型，我们期待测试，我们将研究海平面波动的模式和海洋影响力增加的趋势是否可以通过继承向上识别。这些研究将通过对全岛河流要素进行相分析来进行。这项工作的高潮将是怀特韦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，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可能阻碍我们理解恐龙多样性和分布的种族偏见，并预测未来可能的地点。最后，我们将把恐龙的出现映射到我们的年代地层框架上，并试图评估特定的恐龙是否被隔离到特定的时间片，以描述恐龙的进化，并为恐龙的分类和多样性分析提供信息。

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.