Pleistocene forest on Tenerife's southern coast: a case study of Montaña Negra

Abstract

Montañ a Negra is a 121 m cinder cone in the Bandas del Sur region of southern Tenerife. Formed in the Middle Pleistocene, it comprises alternating phonolitic pumice deposits and scoria layers; the latter are extremely fossiliferous with good taphonomical fidelity. 40 Ar/ 39 Ar age determination provides new dates of 302 AE 7.6 ka and 299.9 AE 11.4 ka for the Lower and Upper Aldea Blanca pumice fall deposits, respectively. This chronological constraint allows comparison of the palaeo-habitat with the global climate at the time of pyroclastic activity. Abundant terrestrial gastropod species and rare disarticulated Coleoptera fragments are to be found. The occurrence of the endemic semi-slug genus Plutonia (Family Vitrinidae) is significant in indicating a woodland habitat in the region during the Middle Pleistocene. We suggest that this may have been forest, possibly dominated by laurel, which is in stark contrast to the present-day semi-desert.

Fossil bee cells from the Canary Islands. Ichnotaxonomy, palaeobiology and palaeoenvironments of Palmiraichnus castellanosi

“…Their modern geographical distribution has been reduced, in comparison with the fossil record, to the Famara Massif (Hutterer and Groh, 1991) where Gayo is located, with more humid cooler conditions than at lower altitudes. LGA also bears shells of Vitrea contracta, a small-sized thin land snail associated with cool moist conditions on El Hierro (Talaván-Serna and Talaván-Gómez, 2008) and with laurel forest on Tenerife (Kappes et al, 2009;Pannell et al, 2011). The abundance of Rebuffoichnus guanche and Rebuffoichnus casamiquelai attributed to beetles (Genise et al, 2013), in association with low densities of P. castellanosi at mid-altitudes of Lanzarote (LGA) during the Holocene, indicates that conditions were more favourable for beetles than for bees.…”