A deep water shelly fauna from the uppermost Ordovician in northwestern Hunan, South China and its paleoecological implications

It is the first time to document the trilobite Mucronaspis (Songxites) wuningensis and the brachiopod Paromalomena-Aegiromenella Assemblage from the Xinkailing Bed (Hirnantian, uppermost Ordovician) in Taoyuan and Cili counties, northwestern Hunan Province. Synecological analysis shows that this is a deep water shelly fauna of South China during the Hirnantian. It lived on the upper Jiangnan Slope in northwestern Hunan, adjacent to the southeast margin of the Upper Yangtze Region, and belongs to the Hirnantia fauna with cool and deep water, and low diversity affinity, similar to its contemporary shelly faunas from the southern Shaanxi Slope adjacent to the north margin of the Upper Yangtze Region, the northern Chongqing depression (new name), and the Jiangxi-Anhui-Jiangsu gentle slope of the Lower Yangtze Region. Paleoecologically, it could be attributed to the BA 4-5 benthic regime (about 60-150 m deep, and deepest to 200 m), and was significantly different from the trilobite M. (S.) mucronata and the typical Hirnantia fauna while the latters may have habited in BA 2-3 benthic regimes (about 5-60 m deep). A new paleogeographic distribution pattern of the Hirnantian shallow and deep water shelly faunas of South China is herein proposed for the first time. Assuming that the depositional rate was constant in northwestern Hunan during the end Ordovician, the duration of the Xinkailing Bed might be only 12 thousand years according to the thickness of the Wufeng Formation and the absolute age values of those relevant graptolitic biozones. Such a short time interval may indicate that the global environmental change during the crisis was much shorter than previously thought, and its influence on the deep water regime was significantly shorter than that on the shallow water regime.