Provenance of Atlantic lingulid brachiopods

Abstract

Living lingulid brachiopods are ubiquitous in low-latitude, marine infaunas. Lingula occurs throughout the Pacific and Indian oceans with the only Atlantic species, L. parva. confined to West Africa. Glottidia is restricted to offshore America from Virginia to California and Peru, and is assumed to have descended from a Pacific Lingula during the early Tertiary, Lingulid organophosphatic shells differ structurally. That of Glottidia is characterized by trellised rods (baculate); that of Indo-Pacific species of Lingula by spheroidal and rod-like microstructures (virgose): And that of L. parva by apatitic rods arranged as spherulites. A spherulitic fabric is unknown in fossil lingulids, but the distinction between Glottidia and Lingula can be traced back to the Carboniferous, which accords with the deep molecular divergence between the two genera. The common occurrence of lingulids with baculate shells in European post-Palaeozoic sediments suggests that ancestral Glottidia entered the Atlantic by the Tethyan Current during the Late Cretaceous/early Cenozoic and migrated into the Pacific before the formation of the Panama Isthmus. Penecontemporaneously, antecedents of L. parva possibly migrated from east Tethys along the trans-Saharan seaway.