Upper Paleozoic charcoal remains from South America: Multiple evidences of fire events in the coal bearing strata of the Parana Basin, Brazil

The occurrence of macroscopic fossil charcoal in sediments has widely been accepted by the scientific community to be a direct indicator for the occurrence of paleowildfires. For the Upper Paleozoic of the Northern Hemisphere, records of macroscopic charcoal are relatively common. On the other hand, for the Southern Hemisphere only a few records have been described for this period. For the Parana Basin in particular, only a single occurrence of fossil charcoal has been described in detail so far. In this study, several occurrences are summarized for the Lower Permian Rio Bonito Formation (Sakmarian-Artinskian). Based on this study, it can be stated that macroscopic charcoal remains can be considered a common element throughout the Lower Permian coal-bearing interval in the southern and southeastern margin of the Parana Basin. The occurrence of fossil macroscopic charcoal remains in different Late Paleozoic mire related clastic deposits of the Parana Basin adds support to previous studies that have demonstrated the abundant presence of inertinite as a petrographic component of various coals in different coalfields in this particular basin. These charcoal occurrences support previous hypotheses that proposed that paleowildfires should have been common during the Early Permian in the Western Gondwana Realm. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.