[Rockhounds] Rare fossil clam discovered alive

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Discovering a new species is always exciting, but so is finding one alive
that everyone assumed had been lost to the passage of time. A small clam,
previously known only from fossils, has recently been found living at
Naples Point, just up the coast from UC Santa Barbara. The discovery
appears in the journal *Zookeys*.

"It's not all that common to find alive a species first known from the fossil
record <https://phys.org/tags/fossil+record/>, especially in a region as
well-studied as Southern California," said co-author Jeff Goddard, a
research associate at UC Santa Barbara's Marine Science Institute. "Ours
doesn't go back anywhere near as far as the famous Coelacanth or the
deep-water mollusk Neopilina galatheae—representing an entire class of
animals thought to have disappeared 400 million years ago—but it does go
back to the time of all those wondrous animals captured by the La Brea Tar
Pits."

On an afternoon low tide in November 2018, Goddard was turning over rocks
searching for nudibranch sea slugs at Naples Point, when a pair of small,
translucent bivalves caught his eye. "Their shells were only 10 millimeters
long," he said. "But when they extended and started waving about a bright
white-striped foot longer than their shell, I realized I had never seen
this species before." This surprised Goddard, who has spent decades in
California's intertidal habitats, including many years specifically at
Naples Point. He immediately stopped what he was doing to take close-up
photos of the intriguing animals.

With quality images in hand, Goddard decided not to collect the animals,
which appeared to be rare. After pinning down their taxonomic family, he
sent the images to Paul Valentich-Scott, curator emeritus of malacology at
the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. "I was surprised and
intrigued," Valentich-Scott recalled. "I know this family of bivalves
(Galeommatidae) very well along the coast of the Americas. This was
something I'd never seen before."

https://phys.org/news/2022-11-rare-fossil-clam-alive.html