Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: Mysterious tentaculitids (Devonian of Maryland)

The sharp little conical fossils above are common Paleozoic fossils, especially in the Devonian. They are tentaculitids now most commonly placed in the Class Tentaculitoidea Ljashenko 1957. Tentaculitids appeared in the Ordovician and disappeared sometime around the end of the Carboniferous and beginning of the Permian. These specimens are from the Devonian of Maryland.

The systematic placement of the tentaculitids has been controversial. Their straight, narrow shells are usually ornamented by concentric rings, and many had septa (thin shelly partitions) inside the cones. The microstructure of the shells is most interesting — it looks very much like that of brachiopods and bryozoans. For this reason and several others, several of my colleagues and I believe the tentaculitids were lophophorates (animals that filter-feed with a tentacular device called a lophophore). They may thus be related to other problematic tubeworms like microconchids and cornulitids (Taylor et al., 2010).

Knowing how the tentaculitids fit into an evolutionary scheme, though, has not helped us figure out what they did for a living. The figure below, from Cornell et al. (2003), shows these funny cones in just about every lifestyle imaginable!

References:

Cornell, S.R., Brett, C.E. and Sumrall, C.D. 2003. Paleoecology and taphonomy of an edrioasteroid-dominated hardground association from tentaculitid limestones in the Early Devonian of New York: A Paleozoic rocky peritidal community. Palaios 18: 212-224.

Taylor, P.D., Vinn, O. and Wilson, M.A. 2010. Evolution of biomineralization in ‘lophophorates’. Special Papers in Palaeontology 84: 317-333.

[Originally published May 29, 2017.]