Search the Community

A few weeks after my mother found her most recent cidarid in an Edwards formation check dam, I took a few minutes to swing by the same dam to see for myself what else could be found. Within minutes I dug up a cylindrical fossil that for a few weeks puzzled me due to its resemblance to a belemnite phragmocone. Then on Wednesday night I went to the DPS meeting and afterwards met briefly with Professor Andy Gale and showed him this specimen. He identified it as a rudist and immediately corroborated that with another DPS member familiar with rudists. What confused me is that it doesn't look like any of the other rudists that I have found in the Edwards. So far in my research I have found there to be 4 predominant rudist genera in the Edwards, which are listed in the tags. From pictures online I can't seem to definitively match this fragment to any of them, but it at least resembles some caprinid rudists I have seen online that are not from the Edwards. I know there must be many more rudist genera in the Edwards that I am unaware of, so I am hoping anyone more familiar with rudists than me could at least narrow it down to more than just a likely caprinid. The specimen is 3.75 cm long (Fig. 1), 4.2 cm in diameter at its concave end (Fig. 20), and 4.1 cm in diameter at its flat end (Fig. 22). I really know next to nothing about them so any help is appreciated. If anyone wants to compare this with the many other rudists that I have found from these Edwards dams, see the excessive amount of pictures in this thread. Fig. 1. Fig. 2.