Fossil skeletal remains (tests, shells, bones, teeth…) are crucial archives for reconstructing past climates, studying biogeochemical cycles and ecosystems using a variety of proxies based on geochemistry, mineralogy or morphometry. The use of mineralised tissues as environmental palaeoarchives is not straightforward. Both the metabolism and the ecology of the organism that produced them must be taken into account. Indeed, the growth of these tissues results from specific biomineralisation pathways, and is dynamic, responding to biological and environmental factors, which can complicate interpretations of information from these archives. Nevertheless, biomineralised tissues provide opportunities for high-resolution reconstruction of environmental or ecological parameters in the deep past. The dynamic growth of hard tissues can be used to reconstruct temporal variations in the environment or ecology of the organism throughout its life-time, down to the hourly scale. Furthermore, the cross-examination of associated organisms with different ecological strategies can provide insight on the variability of environmental parameters in their respective habitats or on their ecological relationships.
This session aims to bring together palaeontologists, biologists, geochemists and other users and developers of proxies from different fields. We welcome contributions aiming to develop or use skeletal hard parts as archives for environmental and ecological parameters. We want to highlight the variety of proxies that can be applied on mineralised tissues to answer palaeoenvironmental and palaeoecological questions throughout the Phanerozoic, including proxy studies of the fossil record and proposals for new proxies. We also aim to stimulate discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the proxies, and the biases associated with biogenic mineralisation, which are key to provide informed interpretation of proxy data. We thus welcome studies of modern organisms, in their natural or artificial habitats, aiming to understand biomineralisation pathways and how various environmental and ecological parameters are recorded in mineralised tissues or highlight how specific biases could be addressed. Finally, we hope that this session will encourage novel scientific collaborations for multidisciplinary and multiproxy studies of hard tissues.