Terrestrial Carbon Isotope Chemostratigraphy in the Yellow Cat Member of the Cedar Mountain Formation: Complications and Pitfalls. Complications and Pitfalls.

Organic carbon (OC) isotope profiles from four sections of the Early Cretaceous continental Yellow Cat Member (YCM) of the Cedar Mountain Formation are presented to explore the constraints of studying and correlating continental sections. A significant body of research demonstrates that some continental chemostratigraphic profiles record global perturbations of the carbon cycle and specifically globally correlative carbon isotope excursions that can be correlated with well-constrained marine carbon isotope records to give some chronostratigraphic constraint. However, this is not always straightforward. Here we present our findings of four sections of the YCM and discuss some caveats of using continental OC isotope records, with an insight into some of the possible solutions. In this study a regionally extensive calcrete holds the key to resolving correlation of poorly reproducible carbon isotope profiles. Here, we tentatively correlate the YCM to the Barremian-lower Aptian.