The late Middle Devonian fauna of Red Hill I, Nevada, and its paleobiogeographic implications

Red Hill I forms the northern end of the Northern Simpson Park Range, northwest of Eureka, Nevada. The Red Hill I locality (lowest part of Red Hill section II in Murphy et al. 1976, Red Hill I of Gregory et al. 1977) lies near the exposed bottom of a sequence of reddish, yellow and greenish gray silty lime mudstones, approximately 80 m thick, at the base of the southwest flank of Red Hill (NW , NE , section 17, T.25N, R.50E on the Horse Creek Valley 15-Minute Quadrangle in Eureka County, Nevada; or 40 030300 N and 116 0200700 W at about 2070 m [approximately 6220 ft.] above sea level). The locality was discovered by Michael Murphy from University of California, Riverside, California, in 1973. The most common fish, Asterolepis, was first described by Murphy et al. (1976). J. T. Gregory and his student J. Reed from University of California, Berkeley, California, continued the excavations in 1974 and 1975, and J. T. Gregory with another Berkeley crew in 1984. In 1979 J. Reed completed a Ph.D. thesis on Asterolepis that was never published; he did publish on other fish though (Reed 1985, 1986, 1992). A crew from the University of Kansas excavated in the years between 1981 and 1987: in 1983 together with one German volunteer (P. Br hn) and systematically layer by layer (Fig. 1) in 1987 together with two German volunteers (P. Br hn and E. Thomas).