Longjiangdong Coral Reef Palaeoecology of the Upper Carboniferous Huanglong Formation in Tianlin County, Guangxi Province

Key words: 
• Guangxi /
• Late Carboniferous /
• coral reefs /
• paleoecology /

Abstract:  A Late Carboniferous coral frame reef developes in Longjiangdong village, Tianlin County, Guangxi Province. The reef basing on the crinoid fragments beach has three separate cycles. The reefbuilder is the fasciculate Diphyphyllum sp. and the reefadherers mainly are crinoids, brachiopods, some kinds of algaes and foraminifers. Reefbuilding communities which just commonly grow together are lack of longterm, stable, complex ecological relationships. The maturity of reef biomes is poor and other reefbuilding ways are absence except Diphyphyllum sp. building the frame. It is formatted only immature stratigraphic reef under polytropic hydrodynamic conditions. The reasons why the Longjiangdong coral reef express such a distinctive characteristic are summarized as the following: the impacts of global geological structure changes in the Middle Carboniferous, the effects of microfloras and algaes in reefbuilding are not obvious, the benthic community is suppressed by crinoids, the reefbuilding capacity of Diphyphyllum sp. is poor for its ecological characteristics.