Wooster’s Fossils of the Week: Silicified productid brachiopods from the Permian of West Texas

Productids ventral valves 052514The three beauties above are productid brachiopods from the Road Canyon Formation (Middle Permian, Roadian, approximately 270 million years old) in the Glass Mountains of southwestern Texas. They are part of a series we’ve done on the silicified fauna of a block of limestone we dissolved in the lab many years ago. The calcitic shells have been replaced with silica during the process of fossilization, so they can be extracted from the carbonate matrix with hydrochloric acid. This is a primary way we can see delicate parts of a fossil, like the long hollow spines above. Ordinarily these would have been lost under the usual processes of taphonomy.

The specimens are highly convex ventral valves, which are characteristic of the productid brachiopods. The long hollow spines helped distribute the weight of these brachiopods on soft and unstable substrata, like a sandy or muddy sediment. This is often called “the snowshoe effect”. Below is a diagram reconstructing productid brachiopods on a sandy substrate with their spines keeping them from sinking below the sediment-water interface.

productid diagramProductid Permian Texas 585Here is a closer view of the ventral valve exterior of one of these productid brachiopods. You can see how delicate the hollow spines are.

Productid interior ventral Permian Texas 585This is the interior of the same valve. Each spine has a hole connecting it to the inside of the shell. The mantle, which secretes the shell and has other physiological functions, extended out into each spine to build its length and possibly carry some sort of sensory abilities.

I have been unable to identify these brachiopods because of the bewilderingly large number of them described by Cooper and Grant in the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe one of our readers can give it a shot!

References:

Brunton, C.H.C., Lazarev, S.S. and Grant, R.E. 1995. A review and new classification of the brachiopod order Productida. Palaeontology 38: 915-936.

Cooper, G.A., and Grant, R.E., 1964, New Permian stratigraphic units in Glass Mountains, West Texas. American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin 48: 1581-1588.

Cooper, G.A., and Grant, R.E. 1966. Permian rock units in the Glass Mountains, West Texas, In: Contributions to stratigraphy, 1966: U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 1244-E: E1-E9.

Cooper, G.A. and Grant, R.E. 1972. Permian brachiopods of West Texas, I. Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology 14: 1–228. [and five other volumes]

Shiino, Y. and Suzuki, Y. 2007. Articulatory and musculatory systems in a Permian concavo-convex brachiopod Waagenoconcha imperfecta Prendergast, 1935 (Productida, Brachiopoda). Paleontological research 11: 265-275.

About Mark Wilson

Mark Wilson is a Professor of Geology at The College of Wooster. He specializes in invertebrate paleontology, carbonate sedimentology, and stratigraphy. He also is an expert on pseudoscience, especially creationism.
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2 Responses to Wooster’s Fossils of the Week: Silicified productid brachiopods from the Permian of West Texas

  1. Sir , can you give directions to the site in Glass mountains

  2. Mark Wilson says:

    Sorry, that location is unavailable.

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