Liu (2016) provides elegant evidence for pyritization of bedding planes at Ediacaran fossil localities of Newfoundland, but fails to demonstrate the ‘death mask' model of moldic preservation for two reasons. First, his petrographic thin sections do not include unpyritized fossils beneath the pyrite, so that his field observations of pyritized fossils are ambiguous (Retallack 2016a). Second, at less than 1.5 mm thick, the pyritic films are insufficient to enable three-dimensional (moldic) preservation (Tarhan et al. 2016). A death mask is a thick (2–3 cm) layer of plaster applied to the face of the deceased to make...
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