THE FIRST EVIDENCE OF DRILLING PREDATION IN INOCERAMIDS

The inoceramid bivalves first appeared in the Permian of Australia (Browne and Newell, 1966; Waterhouse, 1970), thrived during certain intervals in the Jurassic (e.g., the Toarcian; Harries and Little, 1999), and dominated many benthic marine communities globally from the late Early through the Late Cretaceous. Despite excellent preservation (the prismatic, outer calcitic layer is retained in many cases), ubiquitous presence in Late Mesozoic marine deposits, and intense study (e.g., Troger, 1967; Kauffman et al., 1977; Crampton, 1996; Walaszczyk and Cobban, 2000; Walaszczyk et al., 2001), no evidence of predatory drilling in inoceramids has been reported to date. Indeed, evidence of predation of any sort on inoceramids throughout their evolutionary history is limited (Harries and Ozanne, 1998; though see Ozanne and Harries, 2002, for an exception to this). There have been several documented examples of non-predatory borings in inoceramids likely made post mortem by organisms such as bryozoans (Morris, 1990) and acrothoracian barnacles. Rare instances of potential nondrilling predatory attacks on inoceramids by fish (Speden, 1971) and ptychodid sharks (Kauffman, 1972), also have been described (see summary in Harries and Ozanne, 1998). A number of factors may account for the absence of predatory drilling in inoceramids, including: 1) in most instances inoceramids favored oxygen-deficient habitats that excluded at least some drilling predators; 2) the flexibility of the inoceramid prismato-nacreous valves may have made them difficult to puncture or pierce; and 3) in the U.S. Western Interior Seaway (WIS), the region from which these specimens were collected, the paucity of drilled inoceramid specimens also coincides with the delayed onset of all drilling predation as compared to published global patterns. Here, we document the only known examples of predatory drilling on inoceramids preserved in the fossil record.  The specimens in this study were collected in …

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