The Kinney Brick Quarry Lagerstätte, Late Pennsylvanian of New Mexico, USA

Abstract

In Europe and North America, Pennsylvanian strata contain several Lagerstätten, perhaps the best known being Mazon Creek in Illinois, USA. Other important Pennsylvanian Lagerstätten are Montceau-les-Mines in France, Nýrany in the Czech Republic, Linton in Ohio, USA, and Garnett, Robinson and Hamilton in Kansas, USA. The Kinney Brick Quarry in New Mexico, USA, is another significant Lagerstätte, and is the subject of a recently published collection of articles that present new discoveries and research at Kinney (Lucas et al., 2021a). Here, we offer a brief synopsis of the Kinney Lagerstätte based primarily on the research results just published. The Kinney Brick Quarry (Figs. 1-2), located in the Manzanita Mountains of central New Mexico, is a clay pit actively mined for the making of bricks at the Kinney Brick Company plant in Albuquerque, New Mexico. At Kinney, fossils come from deposits of a marine embayment of Late Pennsylvanian age and are remarkable for their diversity, abundance and quality of preservation, which includes the preservation in some cases of soft tissues that normally do not readily fossilize, and a variety of large and exceptionally complete plant remains not well known from correlative deposits. The quantity and quality of preservation have long been used to identify Kinney as a Lagerstätte (e. g., Lucas and Huber, 1991; Kues and Lucas, 1992; Zidek, 1992).