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Were bivalves ecologically dominant over brachiopods in the late Paleozoic? A test using exceptionally preserved fossil assemblages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2019

Shannon Hsieh Open the ORCID record for Shannon Hsieh [Opens in a new window] ,
Andrew M. Bush  and
J Bret Bennington
Shannon Hsieh
Affiliation:
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, 75 North Eagleville Road, Storrs, Connecticut 06269-3043, U.S.A. E-mail: shsieh7@uic.edu.
Andrew M. Bush
Affiliation:
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Center for Integrative Geosciences, University of Connecticut, 75 North Eagleville Road, Storrs, Connecticut 06269-3043, U.S.A. E-mail: andrew.bush@uconn.edu
J Bret Bennington
Affiliation:
Department of Geology, Environment, and Sustainability, Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York 11549, U.S.A. E-mail: J.B.Bennington@hofstra.edu
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Abstract

Interpreting changes in ecosystem structure from the fossil record can be challenging. In a prominent example, the traditional view that brachiopods were ecologically dominant over bivalves in the Paleozoic has been disputed on both taphonomic and metabolic grounds. Aragonitic bivalves may be underrepresented in many fossil assemblages due to preferential dissolution. Abundance counts may further understate the ecological importance of bivalves, which tend to have more biomass and higher metabolic rates than brachiopods. We evaluate the relative importance of the two clades in exceptionally preserved, bulk-sampled fossil assemblages from the Pennsylvanian Breathitt Formation of Kentucky, where aragonitic bivalves are preserved as shells, not molds. At the regional scale, brachiopods were twice as abundant as bivalves and were collectively equivalent in biomass and energy use. Analyses of samples from the Paleobiology Database that contain abundance counts are consistent with these results and show no clear trend in the relative ecological importance of bivalves during the middle and late Paleozoic. Bivalves were probably more important in Paleozoic ecosystems than is apparent in many fossil assemblages, but they were not clearly dominant over brachiopods until after the Permian–Triassic extinction, which caused the shelly benthos to shift from bivalve and brachiopod dominated to merely bivalve dominated.

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Articles
Information
Paleobiology , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , May 2019 , pp. 265 - 279
Copyright
Copyright © The Paleontological Society. All rights reserved 2019 

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Footnotes

*

Present address: Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, 845 West Taylor Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607, U.S.A.

Data available from the Dryad Digital Repository: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.q0f84nh

References

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