Feeding strategies in Cambrian to Middle Ordovician of the Teplá-Barrandian region

The existing evidence for different palaeoecological interactions between primary producers and their primary consumers, as well as between primary and higher consumers are only partly established in Lower Palaeozoic communities. The goal of the proposed project is to study, describe and evaluate the already existing extensive materials of Cambrian to Middle Ordovician findings preserving palaeoecological interactions in different parts of the trophic web. Several thousand specimens of microscopical and macroscopical fossils (both skeletal and soft-bodied) have been collected from Cambrian to Middle Ordovician of the Barrandian area in the last 150 years. Obvious but poorly studied and thus unsufficiently established changes in frequence and proportion of different trofic levels within the "middle" Cambrian - Middle Ordovician interval will be evaluated in detail. Such evaluation of existing and new materials provides an exceptional possibility to follow the agronomic revolution and changes of the complex benthic food web from Cambrian to Ordovician in comparable facies.