NEOGENE BONY FISHES FROM THE BAHÍA INGLESA FORMATION, NORTHERN CHILE

Abstract

Despite being one of the richest Neogene deposits of marine fossil vertebrates along the Pacific coast of South America, no detailed study of bony fishes from the Bahía Inglesa Formation has been carried out. Through the revision of historical collections of the Caldera Paleontological Museum, we describe 27 fossil remains of bony fishes. Fossils described here are distributed in 13 taxa. Among these, Sardinops sp. cf. S. sagax (Clupeidae) represents the first fossil record of the genus for Chile, Labrodon sp. (Labridae) and Stelliferinae (Sciaenidae) are the first respective records for the southeast Pacific Ocean, Sarda sp. (Scombridae) represents the first fossil record for South America, Semicossyphus sp. (Labridae) and Anisotremus sp. (Haemulidae) are the first respective records for the Southern Hemisphere. Gymnosarda sp. (Scombridae) is described for the first time for the Neogene. We performed a paleobathymetric analysis of fossil fishes, including elasmobranchs, to understand the paleoenvironment followed by a similarity analysis that compares the faunal composition of the Bahía Inglesa Fm. with other fossil assemblages for the Pacific of South America. Our results show that the fish fauna from the Bahía Inglesa Fm. likely represents a depth range of 98 to 382 m with a mean depth range of 252 m in an uppermost bathyal environment. The assemblage from the Bahía Inglesa Fm. shows low taxonomic similarity levels with other Neogene geological units from the southeast Pacific Ocean. The study represents the first paleoecological and paleobiogeographic analysis of the fossil fish fauna from the Southeast Pacific.