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Dolichoharpes reticulata before and after


FossilDAWG

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Several years ago I found an upside-down Dolichoharpes reticulata [note: I said dentoni when I first posted this] on a little chip of shale at an outcrop of the Benbolt or more likely the Wardell Formation (hard to differentiate them in the area) in Scott County, SW Virginia.  It was a little roughed up, but still the closest I have ever come to a complete specimen.  Last September I left it with Dan & Ben Cooper, on the advice of @minnbuckeye as they had prepped a spectacular specimen for him previously.  Ben called me a few weeks ago that he was about to start on it, and yesterday he sent me a photo.  He had to glue it to a slab from the same outcrop I had left with him, then prep it out in a dorsal view.  I think he did a spectacular job considering what he had to work with.

 

Before (photo taken Oct 26, 2019):

Dolicho before.jpg

 

After (March 29, 2023)

dolicho after 2.jpg

 

Dolicho after 1.jpg

 

Don

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Cool bug, Don...that is some nifty prep work you had done on it. 

"I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?"  ~Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) 

 

New Mexico Museum of Natural History Bulletins    

 

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Bravo on a great find and the excellent flipped prep job.....Congrats! :thumbsu:

 

According to the literature Dolichoharpes dentoni  is a Canadian species.

 

The Virginia species is Dolichoharpes reticulata – referenced in: Whittington 1949 & Evitt 1951.

 

 

The potential synonymies continue to be unresolved:

 

"The original type specimen of D. dentoni was lost, but WILSON (1947: 11, pl. 1, fig. 8) selected a neotype from material apparently collected from the original type locality. The neotype consists of an imperfectly preserved articulated individual. D. uniserialis is probably the best known of these species (it was redescribed and illustrated in detail by WHITTINGTON 1949). On the basis of usage, should these forms all prove to be synonymous, it would at present appear to be preferable to retain the name D. uniserialis. This taxonomic problem will, however, need to be sorted out at a later date by somebody who is able to compare all of the types."

 

Chatterton, B.D.E., Ludvigsen, R. 1976
Silicified Middle Ordovician Trilobites from the South Nahanni River Area, District of Mackenzie, Canada. 
Palaeontographica Abt.A, 154:1-106

 

 

"Dolichoharpes is the most distinctive harpetid genus, and yet it is the hardest to distinguish at species level. Since Whittington’s (1949) erection of the genus, doubt over the establishment of several new species was expressed by DeMott (1963) and Shaw (1968) (see Chatterton and Ludvigsen 1976). DeMott (1963) synonymized three species (Dolichoharpes escanabe (Hall 1851), D. dentoni (Billings 1863), D. rutrellum (Clarke 1897)) with D. uniseralis, and Shaw (1968) synonymized D. proclivius Esker 1964 and D. arcticus Whittington 1954 with D. reticulata Whittington 1949. The remaining species, D. doranni Whittington 1950a and D. villosus Koroleva 1978 are based on fragmentary specimens, too poor to use for cladistic analysis. In the discussion on D. aff. reticulata, Chatterton and Ludvigsen (1976:43) noted that the characters used to separate North American species were variable, a problem that is common to all species of Dolichoharpes."

 

Ebach, M.C., McNamara, K.J. 2002
A Systematic Revision of the Family Harpetidae (Trilobita).
Records of the Western Australian Museum, 21(3):235-267   PDF LINK

 

 

************************************

 

Chatterton, B.D.E., Ludvigsen, R. 1976
Silicified Middle Ordovician Trilobites from the South Nahanni River Area, District of Mackenzie, Canada.
Palaeontographica Abt.A, 154:1-106

 

DeMott, L.L. 1963
Middle Ordovician Trilobites of the Upper Mississippi Valley.
PhD Thesis, Harvard University, 236 pp.

 

Evitt, W.R. 1951
Some Middle Ordovician Trilobites of the Families Cheiruridae, Harpidae, and Lichidae.

Journal of Paleontology, 25(5):587-616

 

Shaw, F.C. 1968
Early Middle Ordovician Chazy Trilobites of New York.
New York State Museum Memoir, 17:1-163  PDF LINK

 

Whittington, H.B. 1949
Dolichoharpes and the Origin of the Harpid Fringe.
American Journal of Science, Series 5, 247(4):276-285  PDF LINK

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Excellent results!! They do such a wonderful job. I dropped off 3 trilobites that I didn't want to tackle myself to them this winter. Hope my outcomes are as good.

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Thanks Scott. I tried to disentangle the taxonomy but I guess I ended up with a mistaken impression the synonymy went the other way.

 

Don

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Congrats on the great find and kuddos to Dan and Ben Cooper for the excellent prep work. :thumbsu:

The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.  -Neil deGrasse Tyson

 

Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't. -Bill Nye (The Science Guy)

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  • FossilDAWG changed the title to Dolichoharpes reticulata before and after

Wow, that is an incredible prepped  piece.  What a find from far southwest  of me.

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They did a great job, it looks perfectly natural! I wonder if they used any filler, or just carefully contoured parts and glue (and abrasion)

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