EVOLUTION OF THE GONIATITACEAE AND VISEAN-NAMURIAN BIOGEOGRAPHY

Evolutionary lineages within the Carboniferous ammonoid superfamily Go niatitaceae can be recognized using cladistic and stratophenetic analy ses, showing that both approaches lead to coinciding results. In the l ate Visean and Namurian A, ammonoid provinces can be defined by the di stribution of lineages within the goniatite superfamily Goniatitaceae. The first province corresponds to the Subvariscan Realm (where the su perfamily became extinct near the Visean-Namurian boundary), and the s econd embraces the majority of the occurrences, e.g. the South Urals, Central Asia, and North America (where the superfamily with different independent lieages continued up into the late Namurian A). In the Vis ean, the superfamily was, in two short epochs, globally distributed wi th major transgressions, which probably led to migration events. The f irst is at the end of the late Visean A (G. fimbriatus and G. spirifer Zones, when the genus Goniatites had a world-wide distribution with v arious species), and the second at the beginning of the late Visean C (L. poststriatum Zone, when Lusitanoceras is globally distributed).