Living Habits of Ancient Articulate Brachiopods

Extract

Methods of interpretation of living habits of ancient brachiopods.–The most obvious means to interpret life habits of ancient brachiopods is by analogy with living ones. Increased knowledge of the living ones, however, is revealing progressively more pitfalls in the path of using their examples to arrive at easy conclusions regarding the ancient ones. As the analogies are applied to ever more ancient forms, the similarities decrease and the interpretations become increasingly tenuous. Even the supposed “safe” interpretations of ancient terebratulids and rhynchonellids on the basis of analogy with their living relatives are being challenged by new research. Formerly, presence of a pedicle foramen was considered prima facie evidence that the shell lived attached to a substrate of some kind, but this can no longer be assumed, and further evidence for attachment must be sought.