Earlier this month a gentleman stopped by The Department of Geology and donated the above beautiful slab of fossils to our program. Dale Chadwick of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is an avid amateur fossil collector with a very useful website and considerable generosity. His gift to the department makes an excellent Fossils of the Week entry. Later I’ll show you the equally-impressive other side of this specimen!
We have here a fine sandstone from the famous Calvert Formation (lower to middle Miocene) exposed at the Calvert Cliffs, Plum Point, Calvert County, Maryland, in the stratigraphic Shattuck Zone 10. As you can see, some horizons are densely fossiliferous with large numbers of gastropods and bivalves. This is what we refer to us a death assemblage, meaning these shells are not preserved in their life positions but how they accumulated just before final burial. These rocks and their fossils were the initial basis of Susan Kidwell’s important work on taphonomic feedback, or how shell accumulations affect the succeeding living communities.
So what are the prominent fossils in this slab? Dale has the answers on his website. I’ve annotated the image and made a list below:
A Turretilla variabilis (a turritellid gastropod)
B Stewartia sp. (a lucinid bivalve)
C Turritella plebia (a turritellid gastropod)
D Cardium laqueatum (a carditid bivalve)
E Siphonalia devexa (a buccinid gastropod)
So how did several of these animals die on that seafloor long ago? You’ve probably guessed predation by looking at that round hole in specimen B, a lucinid bivalve.
The beveled nature of this round drillhole tells us it was made by a predatory naticid gastropod, which used its radula (a tongue-like device with sharp teeth) to penetrate the calcareous shell and damage the muscles holding it tight against the attack. About half the specimens in this slab show similar predatory penetrations. Wooster alumna Tricia Kelley did critical work on predation styles, intensities and evolutionary patterns with Calvert specimens like these.
Thank you again to Dale Chadwick for his gift!
References:
Kelley, P.H., 1983, Evolutionary patterns of eight Chesapeake Group molluscs: Evidence for the model of punctuated equilibria: Journal of Paleontology 57: 581–598.
Kelley, P.H. 1988. Predation by Miocene gastropods of the Chesapeake Group: stereotyped and predictable. Palaios 3: 436-448.
Kidwell, S.M. 1986. Taphonomic feedback in Miocene assemblages: Testing the role of dead hardparts in benthic communities: Palaios 1: 239–255.
Kidwell, S.M., Powars, D.S., Edwards, L.E. and Vogt, P.R. 2015. Miocene stratigraphy and paleoenvironments of the Calvert Cliffs, Maryland, in Brezinski, D.K., Halka, J.P. and Ortt, R.A., Jr., eds., Tripping from the Fall Line: Field Excursions for the GSA Annual Meeting, Baltimore, 2015: Geological Society of America Field Guide 40, p. 231–279.
