THE USE OF LAND SNAIL SHELLS IN PALEOENVIRONMENTAL RECONSTRUCTION

Fossil land snail shells constitute a valuable source of paleoenvironmental information for the Quaternary. They can be dated by a variety of methods, including radiocarbon, amino acid racemization and epimerization, and perhaps also Th/U and ESR. The vast majority of paleoenvironmental studies based on land snail shells have examined the faunal composition of fossil assemblages, from which a variety of paleoenvironmental characteristics such as biome, temperature, and moisture conditions have been reconstructed. Still, there are a number of problems involved in using this approach and these are discussed. Shell morphology has occasionally been used to reconstruct such factors as rainfall and temperature. Stable isotope studies on Quaternary land snails include: analysis of deltaC-13 values of organic matter in the shells, to reconstruct C4 plant distributions from which rainfall amounts can be inferred, and analysis of deltaO-18 values of shell carbonate, from which trends in the oxygen isotope composition of rainfall can be reconstructed. Stable carbon isotopes of shell carbonate have also been studied but their interpretation is not clear. Amino acid epimerization analysis (D-alloisoleucine/L-isoleucine ratios) of land snail shells has been used for estimation of paleotemperatures. Some potential uses of land snail shells for paleoenvironmental reconstruction include the study of stable isotopes of H and N, periodic growth lines, and deposits of pedogenic carbonates on the shells.