Drhoz
@drhoz
Australian Insect Fanatic (and BritSF fan and Furry)
The 'little drillhole’ mentioned above contains a stalk when the animal is alive, with which they attach themselves to the seafloor. Lingula anatina from Stradbroke Island, Australia - photo by wilson44691 on wiki
Brachiopods superficially resemble bivalved molluscs externally, but have mirror symmetry running across the narrowest plane, unlike bivalves, and very different internal anatomy. A live one, feeding, photographed by Pierre Corbrion - photo off wiki
But it wasn’t until 1915 that ‘Walter’s Little Drillhole’ and Waldheimia sinuata from 'Curiosity Shop, Rakaia Valley, Canterbury’ were recognised as the same species, and placed in a new genus by New Zealand geologist, scientific administrator and museum director James Allan Thomson (1881 –1928) .
They were first collected from a cave at Ototara in 1848, and sent to the UK for study and description. John Morris (1810 – 1886) named it Terebratula gualteri after Walter Mantell, the discoverer. Below - Morris, Mantell, and Mantell riding a moa.
Austro-Hungarian geologist Ferdinand von Hochstetter collected a wide variety of fossils from New Zealand whilst on the Novara Expedition - the first scientific expedition of the Austrian Navy to circumnavigate the world. Below - the man and his map of Auckland's many many volcanoes.
Originally described as Pecten hochstetteri by German palaeontologist Karl Alfred Ritter von Zittel (1839 – 1904).
New Zealand has at least 5 fossil species, found in limestone, marl and greensand rock that was deposited in moderately deep offshore areas. Pic of one of the living species, A. vitrina, from Wiki. Museum of the Vanished World, Duntroon, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Some of them, like pavoninum, are deep-sea species living down to over a kilometer deep, and rely entirely on captured prey for food, unlike shallow-water corals that farm algae inside their own tissues. Live ones look like this - Photo by Nick Hobgood on Wikipedia.
We're clamposting, post a clam Austrovenus stutchburyi from the Banks Peninsula, Aotearoa
The Pacific Geoduck (and the New Zealand Geoduck Panopea zelandica) are prized in the Chinese market, where the flesh of the siphon is considered an aphrodisiac. Can’t imagine why. Museum of the Vanished World, Duntroon, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Geoduck (Gooeyduck) is derived from the Lushootseed name for the animal, and depending which source you consult may mean ‘dig deep’, or refer to a certain part of the male anatomy.
The genus is still around, though - famously as the Pacific Geoduck Panopea generosa found from Alaska to Baja. That species is the largest and longest-living burrowing clam known - the siphon can be a meter long and the clam live for almost 180 years.
One of many extinct species in the genus, although a few are still around. This particular one was around during the mid-Tertiary, from 28 to 16 million years ago, and is a useful index species for NZ rocks of that period.
Living File Clams have bright red flesh and tentacles, and some like the one below from the Lembeh Strait have electric blue flashes.
This one was endemic to the shallow seas around New Zealand, but the various species were widespread around the world, from the Upper Cretaceous to the Eocene, and are quite useful index fossils, and markers for when sea levels rose to flood freshwater habitat.
But by 1939 he’d been informed that that name had already been used for a parasitic protozoan, a beetle, and a fish, so he changed it to something that better reflected New Zealand - namely, the demigod Maui.
The limestone of the area has some very impressive whale & dolphin fossils, some dating from very early in their evolution. The primitive baleen whale genus Mauicetus was originally named in 1937 as Lophocephalus, by WB Benham from the University of Otago.
There are still some fossil whales in situ - the one at Aslan’s Camp was, unwisely, put under perspex that’s gone mostly opaque from exposure, but the one at Earthquakes where part of the hillside slid away down the slope and opened the graben has a whale that fell out of the new cliff.
Most the area being limestone leads to various karst geology - sinkholes like the small one in Duntroon, the various cliffs around the valley, Elephant Rocks and Aslan’s Camp, and the graben at Earthquakes.
Across the road from the museum is a section of the river valley that the locals have restored from pasture into a proper wetland.
From Oamaru the five of us went a little further up the coast to the valley of the Waitaki River, which boasts enough fossil sites, karst landscape, and places of geological and historical interest that it’s been designated a UNESCO Global Geopark.
Pimelia Darkling Beetles are most found in sandy deserts, and are active in the mornings and evenings, burrowing into the dunes to avoid the heat of the day.
A cosmopolitan species, whose caterpillars are usually found feeding on Gentians and others of that family, but also occasionally from plants in the Broomrape and Daisy families.