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Pennsylvanian Calamites Mystery


Archimedes

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While I was putting away my Pennsylvanian Plant Finds from a couple of weeks ago I came across this Calamites with some unusual structures on it, ah maybe an insect under the top layer???? Any suggestions???

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Could it be wrinkles in the 'husk' from over-flexing?

"There has been an alarming increase in the number of things I know nothing about." - Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” - Thomas Henry Huxley

>Paleontology is an evolving science.

>May your wonders never cease!

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Hi Archimedes,

Cool find! I'm not sure what made those marks. None of what people consider 'boring' insects existed during the Carboniferous. Maybe some type of damage post deposition. Could this be trace feeding from an aquatic detritivore?

"They ... savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things."

-- Terry Pratchett

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Archimedes....Well spotted and very unusual... I havent seen that before...The fossil is a cast of the internal surface of the calamites stem so whatever it was that made these tracks was feeding on the inside tissue of the trunk, perhaps from a break at one end of the stem... What aquatic detritivore's do we know could do this?...

Syncarid Shrimp?

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Cyclus?

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Cheers Steve... And Welcome if your a New Member... :)

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interesting, Ive seen these on specimens Ive collected and always figured it was from damage/scaring to the calamite

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From the calamites we've seen this looks like something definitely inside the bark - of course I'm biased because we have been looking for evidence of insects in our explorations at St. Clair - this is very encouraging. There was a woody layer inside calamites which would lend itself to primitive boring. Whether the boring was above ground or underwater (after the tree fell into the swamp) may determine whether its a detritivore and what kind. I tried to find some references online - the first one refers to Carboniferous detritivores and the second (see below) indicates that they were well established in the Devonian:

"Evidence for herbivory in insects appears in the Carboniferous. Like vertebrates, the first insects were carnivores and detritivores. Herbivory requires hosting cellulose-digesting bacteria through a symbiotic relationship within the gut. The oldest examples of marginal and surface feeding is on Carboniferous seed fern leaves of Neuropteris and Glosspteris (Grimaldi & Engel, 2005, p. 52). It is estimated that only 4% of the leaves in Carboniferous deposits exhibit damage from feeding. Herbivores do not make a significant impact on plant life until the Permian" (Kenrick & Davis, 2004, pp. 166-167).

"Detritivores" were apparently well established in the Devonian according to this excerpt from the Devonian Times (Red Hill site) - although this refers to Devonian detritivores but the assumption is that they were better developed by the Carboniferous:

Fossil evidence of detrivorous invertebrates in the Late Devonian is extremely sparce, but investigations of several Late Silurian (e.g., Ludford Lane), Early Devonian (e.g., Rhynie) and Middle Devonian (e.g., Gilboa) sites suggest that a variety of detritivores were already well established by the Late Devonian. These include millipedes (Diplopoda), arthropleurids (many-segmented arthropods that superficially resemble millipedes), oribatid mites (Acari) and springtails (Collembola). With the exception of the extinct arthropleurids, these arthropods are abundant components in modern leaf litter faunae. Also, with the exception of the arthropleurids, these early detritivores were small (typically < 2 cm).

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Archimedes....Well spotted and very unusual... I havent seen that before...The fossil is a cast of the internal surface of the calamites stem so whatever it was that made these tracks was feeding on the inside tissue of the trunk, perhaps from a break at one end of the stem... What aquatic detritivore's do we know could do this?...

Syncarid Shrimp?

post-1630-0-80916100-1348907681_thumb.jpg post-1630-0-32134700-1348907691_thumb.jpg

Cyclus?

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I'm wondering, is the white shadow possibly the outline of the creature that made the burrows, or just an anomaly? It sort of has the outline of the shrimp references (or some of the primitive arthropods).

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From the calamites we've seen this looks like something definitely inside the bark - of course I'm biased because we have been looking for evidence of insects in our explorations at St. Clair - this is very encouraging. There was a woody layer inside calamites which would lend itself to primitive boring. Whether the boring was above ground or underwater (after the tree fell into the swamp) may determine whether its a detritivore and what kind. I tried to find some references online - the first one refers to Carboniferous detritivores and the second (see below) indicates that they were well established in the Devonian:....................

Thanks for your comments hitekmastr, i will look these references up.

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Nice catch Archimedes. I have come across a number of Spirobis in Calamites but nothing like this.

Auspex mentioned wrinkles from stress and hitekmastr brought up insect damage in Neuropteris which reminded me of this piece.

It is a Macroneuropteris scheuchzeri.

There are ripples in the half nearest the base. A really strong tear/tunneling (topside middle) along with several others that are less pronounced on that side all of which follow the veins.

The leaf is 11.5 cm long.There is an indentation/tunnel that is about a cm long that goes across the veins and is located 2.5 cm from the apex in the lower half of the picture.. It shows up as a ridge on the other half of the concretion.

This last item in particular has me leaning toward some of this being insect damage but i am not convinced.

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Nice catch Archimedes. I have come across a number of Spirobis in Calamites but nothing like this.

Auspex mentioned wrinkles from stress and hitekmastr brought up insect damage in Neuropteris which reminded me of this piece.

It is a Macroneuropteris scheuchzeri.

There are ripples in the half nearest the base. A really strong tear/tunneling (topside middle) along with several others that are less pronounced on that side all of which follow the veins.

The leaf is 11.5 cm long.There is an indentation/tunnel that is about a cm long that goes across the veins and is located 2.5 cm from the apex in the lower half of the picture.. It shows up as a ridge on the other half of the concretion.

This last item in particular has me leaning toward some of this being insect damage but i am not convinced.

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Hi BNN,

Awesome Leaf! I don't see anything that indicates insect feeding to me. Again, the common insect boring that you can find anywhere in today's plants had not evolved yet during this time period. Most of the evidence for insect feeding comes from chewed leaf edges, coprolites, and scar markings on trunks of plants from large piercing insects. If you think your leaf does have insect feeding damage you can send an image to the Smithsonian. Dr. Labandiera, would be my recommendation, he is one of the best in the world with plant-insect interactions in the fossil record.

"They ... savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things."

-- Terry Pratchett

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[...]

"Evidence for herbivory in insects appears in the Carboniferous. Like vertebrates, the first insects were carnivores and detritivores. Herbivory requires hosting cellulose-digesting bacteria through a symbiotic relationship within the gut. The oldest examples of marginal and surface feeding is on Carboniferous seed fern leaves of Neuropteris and Glosspteris (Grimaldi & Engel, 2005, p. 52). It is estimated that only 4% of the leaves in Carboniferous deposits exhibit damage from feeding. Herbivores do not make a significant impact on plant life until the Permian" (Kenrick & Davis, 2004, pp. 166-167).

[...]

Hi Hitek,

Great post with excellent information. I just have one issue with the above quote. Insect herbivory is not dependent upon the digestion of cellulose. In fact, its thought the vast majority of modern phytophagous insects lack any bacterial symbionts to digest cellulose. Only a few lineages of insects have been shown to possess endosymbiotic bacteria to digest cellulose.

If you've ever kept a caterpillar as a pet you know exactly how bad they are at digesting the cellulose they eat, most of their intake goes right through them and ends up as frass pellets. This is why they have to eat so much. There is a tremendous amount of energy in cellulose, but they lack the ability to break it down and so have to rely on the sugars and other nutrients in the plant tissue they consume. Phloem feeding insects, like aphids (and probably palaeodictyoptera) never even attempt to digest cellulose, they simply concentrate the nutrients in the saps of plants, their byproduct is extra water and sugars secreted as honeydew.

Finally, even many boring insects lack endosymbionts. My favorite genus of beetle (see my screen name) primarily bores through the cambial tissue of woody plants. As far as we know they lack any endosymbiont and cannot produce their own cellulase or hemicellulase. They simply chew through large quantities of plant matter and filter out the nutrients they want. They then pack the wood shavings into their gallery behind them as frass. This is why the attack of Emerald Ash Borer is so damaging to an ash tree. Agrilus larvae are small, but they must consume a large amount of cambial tissue as they grow and create long switch-backing galleries to do so. In large numbers their feeding will completely girdle the host tree.

"They ... savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things."

-- Terry Pratchett

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Interesting fossil! Is it possible that this damage was caused by some type of gastropod?

I would agree with agrilishunter that it does not appear to be from an insect.

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Its certainly a mystery... 3 distinct parallel contact points... I quite like gastropod...

Cheers Steve... And Welcome if your a New Member... :)

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This is another fascinating insect-related mystery. I think the fossil record for insects from the Carboniferous is still relatively light, and evidence of insects should logically come from high concentrations of plants and trees such as St. Clair where we have been exploring, and other similar sites. Hopefully, more fossil plant hunters will continue to inspect their specimens for evidence of insects (or other plant feeding creatures). I have yet to find something but everyone's contributions on this topic, in this thread and others on the forum, are providing visual clues and cues for what to look for. This is a very interesting avenue of investigation.

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Thanks hitemastr, yes the more that is noticed the more others will observe unusual things that may lead to new discoveries. We know from experience that there is a bias towards preserving certain things in a particular formation, that unless very special circumstances exist only about 10-30 percent of the types of plants and animals that inhabited a paleo-environment is readily preserved, that 20-30 percent of the types are discovered through pieces and detailed examination many of these are hard to interrupt, very few are discovered through chance preservation and the rest are never found.

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Thanks hitemastr, yes the more that is noticed the more others will observe unusual things that may lead to new discoveries. We know from experience that there is a bias towards preserving certain things in a particular formation, that unless very special circumstances exist only about 10-30 percent of the types of plants and animals that inhabited a paleo-environment is readily preserved, that 20-30 percent of the types are discovered through pieces and detailed examination many of these are hard to interrupt, very few are discovered through chance preservation and the rest are never found.

If you factor in that only about 15% of the extinct species have been found, this magnifies the challenge. One of the truly great benefits of Fossil Forum is that dedicated people like you and the others on this thread, and the site, are constantly shining lights on these issues and getting newcomers like me and my wife as well as veterans, to improve our fossil collecting practices. One of the early lessons we learned from doing this is that we need to target what we look for, but also look for the unexpected, and closely examine everything when we get home because there is so much that is easily overlooked. Every light that we shine on the fossil record reveals secrets that would be otherwise lost.

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There is evidence of dragonfly type insects in the Carboniferous, they had to eat other insects of some kind. Insects dont fossilize well they tend to break apart when they die. They are usually preserved in a very fine grained matrix for the most part, such as Florrisant ash. (or amber).

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"_ Carl Sagen

No trees were killed in this posting......however, many innocent electrons were diverted from where they originally intended to go.

" I think, therefore I collect fossils." _ Me

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."__S. Holmes

"can't we all just get along?" Jack Nicholson from Mars Attacks

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If you factor in that only about 15% of the extinct species have been found, this magnifies the challenge. One of the truly great benefits of Fossil Forum is that dedicated people like you and the others on this thread, and the site, are constantly shining lights on these issues and getting newcomers like me and my wife as well as veterans, to improve our fossil collecting practices. One of the early lessons we learned from doing this is that we need to target what we look for, but also look for the unexpected, and closely examine everything when we get home because there is so much that is easily overlooked. Every light that we shine on the fossil record reveals secrets that would be otherwise lost.

This is what makes "The Fossil Forum" great, we learn from one another, the knowledge and backgrounds of all the diverse members is outstanding

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Hi my friends

there is also an unusual structures under the top layer of this bark

best regards

Bruno

Wow another example from europe thanks Bruno

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