It's always exciting to discover a new species, but it's even more exciting to find one alive that everyone assumed was dead. Naples Point is just up the coast from UC Santa Barbara and is home to a small clam. There is a discovery in the journal.
"Especially in a region as well-studied as Southern California, it's not uncommon to find alive a species first known from the fossil record," said co-author Jeff Goddard. We don't go back as far as the famous Coelacanth or the deep-water mollusk Neopilina galatheae, but we do go back to the time of the dinosaurs.
A pair of small, translucent bivalves caught his eye when he was looking for sea slugs at Naples Point. He said that their shells were 10 millimeter long. I had never seen a species like this before. He has spent decades in California's intertidal habitats and was surprised by this. He stopped taking pictures of the animals immediately.
The animals appeared to be rare, so Goddard decided not to take them. The images were sent to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History by the man. "I was surprised and curious," she said. I'm familiar with the family of bivalves along the coast of the Americas. This was the first thing I'd ever seen.
He said he needed to see the animal in person to make a proper assessment. He went back to Naples Point to get his clam. He didn't find his prize after two hours of searching. The species would keep trying to get him.
The needle in the haystack was a single specimen next to a couple of small white nudibranchs and a large Chiton. The pair could finally work on identification after he got his specimen.
He was surprised when he got to hold the shell. The shell didn't match any of the others in the same group. They had a chance to find a new species.
This really started the hunt for me. All of the scientific literature from 1758 to the present is needed when I suspect a new species. It can be difficult, but with experience it can be done quickly.
Two researchers are looking at a reference to a fossil species. The Bornia cooki was described in the paper in 1937. The specimen was similar to the modern one. If this is true, it means that Goddard found a living fossil.
The scientist who described the species, George Willett, estimated that he had excavated and examined 1 million fossils from the same location. He didn't find B cooki himself. He named it after a Baldwin Hills collector.
Willett's original specimen was requested from the Natural History Museum. The "type specimen" is the ultimate arbiter of the identification of a clam.
There is a single empty shell under a boulder at Naples Point. The specimen from Naples Point was the same as Willett's. He said it was remarkable.
All of this raises the question of how the clam was undetected for so long. There is a long history of shell-collecting and malacology in Southern California, including people interested in the harder to find micro-mollusks.
He thinks the clams may have arrived here on currents from the south during the marine heatwaves of the last two years. Many marine species were able to extend their distributions northward thanks to these. If the animal's growth rate and longevity are taken into account, no one had noticed C. cooki at the site prior to the year 2000.
The Pacific coast of Baja California has broad intertidal boulder fields that stretch literally for miles.
A fossil species found off the coast of southern California has notes on the genera Bivalvia and Galeommatoidea. There is a book titled "zookeys.11282.95139."
Journal information: ZooKeys
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