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Inoceramus?


stwxy

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Hi everyone, I found this piece of Inoceramus from the Upper Cretaceous Tununk Shale near Hanksville, Utah. Can anyone help me recognize the species of this? Also, if anyone could recommend some information (e.g. websites, books, etc.) about the fossils of Upper Cretaceous in the Western Interior Seaway, I'll be greatly appreciated!

post-18847-0-58988700-1435681757_thumb.jpg

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I think the genus may actually be Mytiloides. There are a large number of species, many of which are index species used to divide the Late Cretaceous (and especially the Turonian and Cenomanian) into biozones. I'm not so familiar with the various species that I would care to offer a species-level ID based on one photo. However if you do a google search for Mytiloides you'll probably get at least a reasonable match.

Don

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  • 1 month later...

If your getting in depth with ammonites, baculites, nautilus, and belemnoids, I would recommend Ammonites and Other Cephalopods of the Pierre Seaway by Neal Larson. For clams and other pelycopods I don't really know of any.

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I'm a bit curious about why people think Baculites are different from ammonites? I often see people refer to "Baculites and ammonites", which seems redundant to me.

I agree that Larson's book is a good resource. It brings together a lot of information it would be hard to pull together from the original research publications. However, in my copy the photos are a bit dark and for some species distinguishing details are hard to see. The basic issue (I suspect) is that most of the specimens were photographed without whitening, so you have all the color variation of the "raw" specimen confounding the light/shadow that indicates surface detail. As an alternative example, "West Coast Fossils" (by Ludveigsen & Beard) is an excellent account of Vancouver Island fossils where all the specimens were whitened and so the images show excellent, crisp detail.

Don

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  • 5 weeks later...

You are right FossilDAWG, Baculites is in fact just another type of heteromorph ammonite. People often confuse Baculites with Orthoceras, belemnites, not to mention crinoids which are not even closley related to Baculites whatsoever. How you can tell Orthoceras, Endoceras, Michelinoceras, and other orthoconic nautiloids from Baculites is the suture pattern. Nautiloids tend to have very simple smooth sutures, while ammonites from the Late Cretaceous developed flower-shaped ones. I believe why Larson colors the ammonites in his book is because sometimes color can make identification confusing

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It's very hard to say if the genus is Mytiloides or Inoceramus, because of the very similar growth rings and shape.The only thing that I can say now is the fact of the speciemen belong to Inoceramidae family.

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