For 2023, I produced a twelve-month calendar featuring twelve genera of gastropods collected from rocks in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. The calendar wasn’t a big seller, I sold it at cost via LuLu and gifted several copies to friends in the paleontology community. Calendar Back Panel Text The Glenshaw Formation inRead More →
A recent discovery of a site with abundant roughly preserved Strobeus shells has piqued my curiosity for cutting them open to see the internal structure. The site occasionally preserves material with intact shells, but they are brittle and can shatter easily. During regular mashing of the limestone, they become disconnected,Read More →
The gastropod Bellerophon nodocarinatus (=Euphemites nodocarinatus) was named by Hall in 1858 in a geological report of Iowa. The name means knotty/lumpy kneels (or carina), characterized by the dual lumpy ridges visible from the anterior margin across the shell. Members of Euphemites have spiral lirae that appear in the aperture and extend toward theRead More →
The Vestigastropoda is a subclass of gastropods that live only in marine environments and have a nacreous layer. The group includes members of the superfamily Pleurotomarioidea, known for shells featuring a selenizone. The selenizone is a slit feature on shells that the living creature uses to aim its exhalant current.Read More →
I’ve been busy writing elsewhere, so the posts portion of this website is starting to age. Nevertheless, I have discovered several new things over the past few months, and I wanted to share at least one. I found a large specimen of a member of the Bellerophontidae, but in theRead More →
In the past, this gastropod was known as Bellerophon (Pharkidonotus). The name in parenthesis is due to subgenera naming. In modern gastropod taxonomy, several sub and super-names are used, including unranked groups that don’t fall into a classic hierarchy. McCoy named the family Bellerophontidae in 1852 in the publication “DescriptionRead More →
In doing broader research on three species of Strobeus that occur within the Glenshaw Formation in Western Pennsylvania, I have discovered many excellent plates by former authors. These plates are miniature works of art, capturing details of these fossil gastropods that may not be available in photographs. The art canRead More →
An excellent specimen of Trepospira sphaerulata was recovered in late December 2021. It is a much better example of this species of Paleozoic gastropod, so I am replacing the content of this article with photos of it. New images should help future researchers search for an excellent example of thisRead More →
Timothy Conrad’s description of the Paleozoic gastropod Turbo insectus in 1835 was an open-and-shut case. He described and figured a new species of the genus Turbo in his historical, single-sentence description. His was the first report of North American marine fossils of the Pennsylvanian age. Unfortunately, this was also theRead More →
The Paleozoic gastropod (snail) Shansiella carbonaria (Yin 1932) is a common find in the Pine Creek limestone locality I search in Armstrong County. Specimens are easy to come by, and each is unique and visually pleasing to examine. Norwood & Pratten described this medium-sized snail more than 160 years agoRead More →