T199 Eocene Northern North America: Biotic Change and Environmental Context
Tuesday, 21 October 2014
8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
220
EARLY EOCENE INSECTS OF THE OKANAGAN HIGHLANDS
Paper number: T199-13
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 10:55 AM – 11:10 AM
Authors
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Rolf W. MathewesSimon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC
Abstract
Some nineteen orders and easily over a hundred families of insects are now known from the early Eocene Okanagan Highlands series of fossil sites that occur scattered across about a thousand kilometers of southern British Columbia into north-central Washington. These rich deposits of highly diverse and finely preserved insects constitute an unprecedented opportunity to examine the state of insect life in a temperate upland during the early Eocene Climatic Optimum—the warmest sustained portion of the Cenozoic—a time when high-latitude Holarctic land connections and frost free winters reaching into the high Arctic facilitated intercontinental biotic interchange, and expanding plant-insect interactions were setting the stage for the emergence of modern terrestrial ecosystems.