Stratigraphic distribution, paleoecology, biogeography, and systematic paleontology of 50 species of Ordovician nautiloids from the midcontinent.

A “superbly written, richly illustrated” guide to the animals who lived 450 million years ago—in the fossil-rich area where Cincinnati, Ohio now stands (Rocks & Minerals). The region around Cincinnati, Ohio, is known throughout the world for the abundant and beautiful fossils found in limestones and shales that were deposited as sediments on the sea floor during the Ordovician Period, about 450 million years ago—some 250 million years before the dinosaurs lived. In Ordovician time, the shallow sea that covered much of what is now the North American continent teemed with marine life. The Cincinnati area has yielded some of the world’s most abundant and best-preserved fossils of invertebrate animals such as trilobites, bryozoans, brachiopods, molluscs, echinoderms, and graptolites. So famous are the Ordovician fossils and rocks of the Cincinnati region that geologists use the term “Cincinnatian” for strata of the same age all over North America. This book synthesizes more than 150 years of research on this fossil treasure-trove, describing and illustrating the fossils, the life habits of the animals represented, their communities, and living relatives, as well as the nature of the rock strata in which they are found and the environmental conditions of the ancient sea. “A fascinating glimpse of a long-extinct ecosystem.” —Choice

Since their origin in the Early Cambrian, the bivalve molluscs have evolved a remarkable variety of forms that reflect their diverse habits through the Phanerozoic Eon. The thirty papers in this volume represent the proceedings of an international symposium on the paleobiology and evolution of the bivalves held at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Canada, from September 29 through October 2, 1995. An international group of authors, representing a dozen countries, draw on diverse aspects of both fossil and living bivalves, including their forms, functional morphology, morphogenesis, taphonomy, shell microstructure, cladistic relationships, biostratigraphic distributions, and molecular sequences. The result is an authoritative and comprehensive collection of studies dedicated to Dr. Norman D. Newell, an eminent paleontologist whose ongoing contributions to the study of bivalve evolution spans six decades. With more than 200 illustrations and a foreword by renowned paleobiologist and author Stephen Jay Gould, Bivalves: An Eon of Evolution presents a broad spectrum of current research on fossil and living bivalves.