Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A terebratulid brachiopod from the Middle Jurassic of northwestern France

We have another beautiful brachiopod this week from our friend Mr. Clive Champion in England. He sent me a surprise package of fossils earlier this year. They are very much appreciated by me and my students!

The specimen above is Cererithyris arkelli Almeras, 1970, from the Bathonian (Middle Jurassic) of Ranville, Calvados, France. (Ranville, by the way, was the first village liberated in France on D-Day.) It is a terebratulid brachiopod, which we have seen before on this blog from the Miocene of Spain and the Triassic of Israel. They have the classic brachiopod form. The image above shows the dorsal valve with the posterior of the ventral valve housing the round hole for the fleshy stalk (pedicle) it had in life.
This is a side view of C. arkelli. The dorsal valve is on the top; the ventral valve on the bottom. It is from this perspective that brachiopods were called “lamp shells” because they resemble Roman oil lamps.
This is the ventral view of the specimen. These brachiopods are remarkably smooth.
Cererithyris arkelli was named by Almeras (1970) in honor of William Joscelyn Arkell (1904–1958). Arkell was an English geologist who essentially became Dr. Jurassic during the middle part of the 20th Century. I’m shocked to see that with all his publications, awards and accomplishments, he died when he was only 54 years old.

W.J. Arkell grew up in Wiltshire, the seventh child of a wealthy father (a partner in the family-owned Arkell’s Brewery) and artist mother (Laura Jane Arkell). He enjoyed nature as a child, winning essay contests on his observations of natural history in his native county and south on the Dorset coast. Arkell was unusually tall for his age (6 feet 4.5 inches by age 17.5 years in an unusually detailed note) and was considered to have “outgrown his strength”. Nature and writing were escapes from athletic events. He also published poems.

Arkell attended New College, Oxford University, intending to become an entomologist, but Julian Huxley was his tutor and he quickly adopted geology and paleontology. Eventually he earned a PhD at Oxford in 1928, concentrating his research on Corallian (Upper Jurassic) bivalves of England. As a side project, he published work on Paleolithic human skeletons from northern Egypt.

Oxford suited Arkell, so he stayed there as a research fellow, expanding his research to the entire Jurassic System of Great Britain, then Europe, and then the world. His work became the standard for understanding Jurassic geology and paleontology for decades.

After World War II (in which he served in the Ministry of Transport), Arkell took a senior research position at Trinity College and the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge University, continuing his work on the Jurassic. He travelled often, including long stints in the Middle East. His health was never good, though, and he had a stroke in 1956, and died after a second stroke in 1958.

During his career Arkell received the Mary Clark Thompson Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in the USA, a Fellowship in the Royal Society, the Lyell Medal from the Geological Society of London, and the Leopold von Buch medal from the German Geological Society.

References:

Almeras, Y. 1970. Les Terebratulidae du Dogger dans le Mâconnais, le Mont dʼOr lyonnais et le Jura méridional. Étude systématique et biostratigraphique. Rapports avec la paléoécologie. Documents des Laboratoires de Géologie Lyon, 39, 3 vol.: 1-690.

Arkell, W.J. 1956. Jurassic Geology of the World. New York; Edinburgh: Hafner Publishing Co; Oliver & Boyd; 806 pp.

Cox, L.R. 1958. William Joscelyn Arkell 1904-1958. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 4: 1.

Rousselle, L. and Chavanon, S. 1981. Le genre Cererithyris (Brachiopodes, Terebratulidae) dans le Bajocien supérieur et le Bathonien des Hauts-Plateaux du Maroc oriental. CR somm. Soc. Géol France, 1981: 89-92.