In Central Asia, Uzbekistan offers the rare opportunity to study the palaeontological inventory in exposures of Cam brian to Recent sediments (Kim et al. 2007). Concerning the Palaeozoic sedimentary records, the ZeravshanGissar Mountains located both in Uzbekistan and Tadjikistan are particularly important (Bardashev et al. 2005). There, the palaeontological record of the Palaeozoic sequence is both diverse and well preserved. In an area covering 56 km 2 located about 170 km southsoutheast of Samar kand, Ordovician to Carboniferous sediments are well ex posed in a mountainous area. This area is protected since 1979 by the Uzbek government. It is known as the Kitab State Natural Reserve (Fig. 1A) and a research station (Za povednik village) has been created in order to encour age scientific research in this region (Yolkin et al. 1997). In 2004, Uzbekistan even edited stamps depicting an outcrop of the early Emsian in the Khodzha Kurgan Gorge and the early Emsian ammonoid "Mimosphinctes" rudicostatus Bogoslovsky, 1980(Ernst & Klug 2011.The Kitab area is famous for more or less continuous successions ranging from the Middle Ordovician to the early Carboniferous, with shallow water to terrigenous siliceous carbonates in the Devonian part and only moder ate tectonic disturbance according to Yolkin et al. (2008). Moreover, this area is of great importance for researchers focusing on the Early Devonian due to the presence of the Pragian-Emsian Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (Yolkin et al. 1997) as well as the rich cephalopod successions in much of the Emsian. The Pragian-Emsian GSSP was defined here because of the excellent conodont record in the Zinzilban Gorge. The current Pragian-Emsian GSSP marks the level where the conodont Polygnathus kitabicus appeared first (Yolkin et al. 1997), although it is currently being revised (Carls et al. 2008, Izokh et al. 2011, Kim et al. 2012. The current boundary is very close to the lithological boundary between the reefal and the pelagic facies (Kim et al. 2012). The origin of this sedi ment ological and palaeoecological transition is one of the 337