Animalia > Mollusca > Monoplacophora > Kirengellidae

Kirengellidae

Wikipedia Abstract

The Kirengellids are a group of problematic Cambrian fossil shells of marine organisms. The shells bear a number of paired muscle scars on the inner surface of the valve. These fossils have conventionally been regarded as monoplacophoran molluscs, and possibly ancestral to gastropods or cephalopods. They were presumed to be exogastric on the presumption that their larger muscle scars were anterior, but it may be dangerous to compare these scars with molluscan musculature. In any case, they coiled in the opposite direction to Romaniella. However, their calcitic shells, the position of the muscle scars, and putative association with secondary shell elements, make a brachiopod affinity possible, by analogy with the mobergellans: a group of phosphatic shells from the same time period, with a s
View Wikipedia Record: Kirengellidae

Genus

Kirengella (10)

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External References

Species taxanomy provided by GBIF Secretariat (2022). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org on 2023-06-13; License: CC BY 4.0