When we picked up this beautiful fossil in southwestern France this summer, Paul Taylor immediately predicted it would become a Wooster Fossil of the Week. Macy Conrad (’18), Paul and I were on our wonderful expedition in the Type Campanian (Upper Cretaceous) of France. Paul took us to a most unpromising plowed field, claiming there were fossils here from the Maurens Formation. Sure enough we found a pile of large fossils that farmers had picked from their fields. They included probably the most distinctive invertebrate organism of the Late Cretaceous: the rudist clam. Hard to believe these conical objects were clams, but such is evolution. (They have the disconcerting shape and size of other objects found in some French fields: artillery shells!)
The cone itself is the right valve of these sedentary bivalves. The capping valve is the left, as seen here from the top. (Right and left make little sense unless you think of their more traditional bivalved ancestors.) Note that this valve has a reticulate, almost lacy pattern to the shell. Rudists were filter-feeders like most bivalves, but they may have also supplemented their nutrition with photosynthetic symbionts in their mantle tissue. The holes in the top valve may have allowed sunlight to hit the upper mantle.
This stratigraphic chart, courtesy of Platel et al. (1999) via Paul Taylor, shows the Maurens Formation at the top of the Campanian in southwestern France. Our primary Campanian work in SW France is with the three units below (the Biron, Barbezieux and Aubeterre formations).
A typical heterodont clam is in the upper left of this diagram; the rest are elaborate rudist clams. In the lower right is a drawing of the type of rudist photographed above. Diagram from Schumann & Steuber (1997).
Rudists flourished in Cretaceous seas right up until the mass extinction at the end of the period. They are often characterized as reef builders, but most were probably living on soft sediment substrates, like our friend here.
References:
Gili, E., Masse, J.P. and Skelton, P.W. 1995. Rudists as gregarious sediment-dwellers, not reef-builders, on Cretaceous carbonate platforms. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 118: 245-267.
Platel, J.-P. 1996. Stratigraphie, seédimentologie et évolution géodynamique de la plate-forme carbonatée du Crétacé supérieur du nord du basin d’Aquitaine. Géologie de la France 4: 33-58.
Platel, J.-P., Faugeras, P., Mauroux, B., Spencer, C., Charnet, F., Célerier, G., Harielle, B. and Jacquement, P. 1999. Notice explicative, Carte géologie France (1/50 000), feuille Thenon, Orléans, BRGM, 128 p.
Schumann, D. and Steuber, T. 1997. Rudisten. Erfolgreiche Siedler und Riffbauer der Kreidezeit. Städte unter Wasser-2 Milliarden Jahre.-Kleine Senckenberg-Reihe 24: 117-122.
Steuber, T., Mitchell, S.F., Buhl, D., Gunter, G. and Kasper, H. U. 2002. Catastrophic extinction of Caribbean rudist bivalves at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. Geology 30: 999-1002.
Looks like a great substrate for crowds of borers and encrusters
You’d think, but I remember being disappointed in the sclerobionts. We’ll have to ask Paul, who still has the specimen at his chateau.
Interesting. I wonder how thick the periostracum was. T