Ecology ofEurydesmaand theEurydesmafauna, Permian of eastern Australia

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Eurydesma is a large, equivalved, monomyarian bivalve found at more than 100 localities in eastern Australia and other parts of Gondwanaland. It has massively thickened umbones which maintained the shells in an upright posture analogous to that seen in the modern reef clam Tridacna. Eurydesma is preserved in this orientation in many localities in eastern Australia, and seems to have preferred hard clean sublittoral substrates; it was an opportunist which rapidly colonized sediments derived from rocky shorelines. With the possible exception of a specimen from the Late Carboniferous of Argentina, the oldest occurrences of Eurydesma are probably approximately coeval but its exit seems to be diachronous in different parts of eastern Australia; Eurydesma may have disappeared because of habitat restriction, ecological replacement, or global warming. Since its youngest occurrences can be correlated with palaeolatitude, the last is most likely.

This publication has 13 references indexed in Scilit: