Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A giant oyster (Eocene of Texas)

It’s no ordinary oyster, of course, because it comes from Texas. It certainly is the largest oyster I’ve ever seen. Wooster received it as part of a large donation in 2010. (You can see students studying it in this previous blog entry.)

All we know is that it came from Texas (a notoriously big place) and the Eocene Series. It appears to be the extinct oyster Crassostrea gigantissima (Finch, 1824). Curiously, this is the first fossil species described from the Paleogene of North America (see Howe, 1937). It is worth quoting the entire description:

Fossils. This extensive formation is chiefly composed of a large species of ostrea, which I believe has not yet been described. A specimen of it may be seen in the Philadelphia museum; it is twelve inches long and two and three-quarters wide, and each valve from half to two and a quarter inches thick — Major Ware says they occur larger; on account of their great size I propose to call them Ostrea Gigantissima. The shells appear but slightly changed by their residence in the earth, and are in many parts used for burning into lime. (Finch, 1824, p. 40)

This is what it took to name a new species in 1824! Since then, of course, we have a detailed set of rules for naming animal taxa detailed in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. The Lawrence (1991) reference below is an example of what we often have to do in order to bring old names like “Ostrea Gigantissima” up to, well, Code.

The interior of the attaching valve of Crassostrea gigantissima.

The top surface of our giant oyster is riddled with these small holes. They are produced by the boring sponge Entobia, which is the next Fossil of the Week.

References:

Finch, J. 1824. Geological essay on the Tertiary Formations in America. The American Journal of Science and Arts 7: 31-42.

Howe, H.V. 1937. Large oysters from the Gulf Coast Tertiary. Journal of Paleontology 11: 355-366.

Lawrence, D.R. 1991. The neotype of Crassostrea gigantissima (Finch, 1824). Journal of Paleontology 65: 342-343.