Borings and bioerosion in fossils

Abstract

Ancient marine organisms that excavated holes in shells and other calcium carbonate substrates on the sea bed have not been widely studied by palaeontologists. Together with scrape and scratch marks made by rasping grazers on shell surfaces, they constitute a group of hard–substrate trace fossils that have many modern equivalents. Even the smallest forms can be studied by casting the holes in plastic resin and dissolving the shell. The variety of borers increased in the Mesozoic Era, thereby avoiding the attentions of predatory groups that were radiating at the same time.

Borings in trepostome bryozoans from the Ordovician of Estonia: two ichnogenera produced by a single maker, a case of host morphology control

“…Borings are frequent bioerosional features (Palmer & Plewes 1993) within Lower Palaeozoic faunas (Kobluk et al 1978;Wilson 2000;Wilson & Palmer 2006) where they have been identified variously as predatory borings or domiciles (see references in Wilson & Palmer 2001). Such borings are known to affect many taxa including brachiopods (Clarke 1921;Kaplan & Baumiller 2000;Vinn 2004Vinn , 2005, bryozoans (Cameron 1969a, b;Cuffey 1977;Kobluk & Nemcsok 1982;Spjeldnaes 1981;Pickerill et al 1984;Buttler & Wyse Jackson 1997;Wilson & Lazzuri 2000), corals (Elias 1986;Tapanila & Holmer 2006), and stromatoporoids (Clarke 1921;Nield 1984;Pemberton et al 1988;Tapanila et al 2004;Tapanila & Holmer 2006).…”

“…Borings are frequent bioerosional features (Palmer & Plewes 1993) within Lower Palaeozoic faunas (Kobluk et al. 1978; Wilson 2000; Wilson & Palmer 2006) where they have been identified variously as predatory borings or domiciles (see references in Wilson & Palmer 2001).…”

Pattern Versus Process or Informative Versus Ininformative Ichnotaxonomy: Comments on Nielsen and Nielsen, 2001

“…Conflation of boring and etching structures with bioclaustrations, such as pseudoborings sensu stricto (Bromley, 1970;Palmer and Wilson, 1988) and shallowly penetrative pseudoetchings (see Palmer and Plewes, 1993), long has been due to poor observation and interpretation of the generally morphologically simple patterns at hand. Taxonomic classification, and we suspect more pertinently ichnotaxonomy, should have as a major goal information retrievability.…”

The Earliest Giant Osprioneides Borings from the Sandbian (Late Ordovician) of Estonia

“…The oldest macroborings in the world are the small simple holes of Trypanites reported in Early Cambrian archaeocyathid reefs in Labrador [1] , [2] . The next oldest macroborings are found in carbonate hardgrounds of Early Ordovician age [3] , [4] , [5] , [6] . There was a great increase in bioerosion intensity and diversity in the Ordovician, now termed the Ordovician Bioerosion Revolution [7] .…”