CORNULINA, A FOSSIL GASTROPOD FROM ENGLAND AND ALABAMA

In 1987, during a sabbatical from my teaching, I travelled to England and France in order to collect Paleocene and Eocene fossil mollusks for my on-going research. I was invited by a local fossil-collecting club to accompany them to a rich-fossil locality at “Baron-on-Sea” in southern England. On that excursion, I met John Quayle, who was an avid collector of Eocene fossils, especially at the this particular locality. He was kind enough to donate some really nice fossil specimens to me. Two of these specimens were the Eocene gastropod Cornulina minax (Solander in Brander, 1766). One of these specimens is figured below.

Cornulina minax, upper middle Eocene (Bartonian Stage), “Barton-on-the Sea,” southern England. Specimen dimensions: length 2.75 inches [6 cm], width 1.5 inches [4 cm].

Cornulina, a carnivorous neogastropod that belongs to family Melongenidae. Its geologic time range is Paleocene to Eocene, and this gastropod lived in warm shallow seas in southern Europe, southeastern United States, and reportedly also in Africa, northeast Mexico, and Columbia.

For those who are interested in Cornulina, it should be noted that Dockery (1980:pl. 2, figs. 5A, 5B) reported a supbspecies, Cornulina minax compressa, in the Eocene fossil record of Mississippi. There are some minor differences between this subspecies and C. minax from England.

 

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Two years later, I made fossil-collecting trip to Alabama and Mississippi in order to collect Paleocene and Eocene mollusks for my on-going research. Based on some information from a geologist I encountered while exploring the area, I visited a rich-fossil locality in the Eocene Gosport Sand at Little Stave Creek in western Alabama. While collecting for a considerable length of time, I found a single specimen of the gastropod Cornulina armigera. This specimen is figured below.

Cornulina armigera, upper middle Eocene (Bartonian Stage), upper Gosport Sand, Little Stave Creek, Jackson, Alabama. Specimen dimensions: length 3 inches [7 cm], width 3 inches [7.25 cm, including spines].

Reference Cited:

Dockery, D.T. III. 1980. The invertebrate macropaleontology of the Clarke County, Mississippi area. Mississippi Department of Natural Resources Bureau of Geology, Bulletin 122, 392 pp.