Allopinna godleskya

September 4

First, hats off to @BobWill and his Falcatopinna bobwilliamsi Yancey 2024. We've been excited and waiting for this paper for years.

In the Summer of 2021, Tom Yancey stopped by my house to study a collection of pinnids I had amassed over several seasons. I wanted to know what genus or species they were, and in February 2021, I wrote and published a long web article weighing the differences between Aviculopinna and Meekopinna. Yancey et al. were working on a different manuscript "Rebuilding the foundation of late Paleozoic pinnid bivalve study (family Pinnidae) (Yancey, Amler, Raczyński, & Brandt, 2023)" and his European counterparts found my article and pointed Tom my way.

I collected about 100 specimens, and Tom stopped at my house to study them while teaching me a lot about pinnid morphology. People previously kept telling me these were Pteronites. The Ohio Publication “Pennsylvanian Marine Bivalvia and Rostroconchia of Ohio” heavily uses Pteronites in the text for pinnids. This is likely due to the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology (1969) publishing the synonymy, with Pteronites as the senior name. Yancey’s 2023 assessment shows that Pteronites is a small genus limited to early Pennsylvanian specimens.

It's been over three years since he left, but the paper is finally released in a 129-year-old journal. Its final form notes an August 2024 publication date, so I can talk about it now. The PRI website has yet to offer it for sale: https://www.priweb.org/research-and-collections/bulletins-of-American-paleontology .

However, Google Books has a reference up: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Revision_of_Late_Paleozoic_Pinnid_Genera/bAfU0AEACAAJ?hl=en

Allopinna Yancey 2024 is the best of both worlds. It has the inflated shell shape of some species of Orthopinna and the shell ornamentation and posterior margin of Meekopinna.

Allopinna godleskya Yancey 2024 is the type species of Allopinna.

You can see some here. The holotypes and some paratypes are there, but they now live at the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh.
https://fossil.15656.com/catalog/search-for/Allopinna

I hoped for an acknowledgment at best but didn't think it would be named in my honor.

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Here are some specimens I've collected after Tom stopped to study and take my specimens for donation.

CG-0399—Allopinna godleskya Brush Creek limestone, Parks Township, PA, USA
Note the prominent hingeline along the top. The separated shell layers make getting one of these with the outside intact challenging. Lucky for me here, this was embedded in a wood-like matrix.