Lingula (genus)
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Lingula sp. on the beach of Ozamis City (Philippines). |
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Lingula | ||||||||||||
| Bruguière , 1791 |
Lingula is a genus of the armpods (Brachiopoda). The animals live in self-dug tubes in the sandy mud on the shores of tropical and subtropical seas. In contrast to other arm pods, they also tolerate brackish water . The sides of the living tube are solidified with a sticky secretion that the animals secrete from their coat. They can move up and down in the tubes with the help of their long, muscular handle. Like all brachiopods feeds Lingula as filter feeders .
In Japan, Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, the muscular stalk of animals is eaten by humans.
features
Lingula is a little over 20 centimeters long with a stem and has a two-lobed, lockless housing. The two halves of the housing are only held together by closing and opening muscles and not secured by lock pits and teeth. Thus, the flaps can be moved and displaced with respect to one another and can be used for digging. The housing consists of alternating layers of calcium phosphate and organic material.
A living fossil
Lingula can be found in fossils as early as 400 million years ago in the Silurian , making it one of the oldest genus that is still alive today and is considered a living fossil . It survived both the great mass extinction on the Permian-Triassic boundary and the more well-known one on the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary . The fossil remains can not be distinguished morphologically from the recent ones. The shells of lingula- like armpods are also known from the Ordovician . Here, however, the shell inside and thus the number and location of the muscle attachment points is unknown, so they Lingula can not be assigned.
Recent species
- Lingula adamsi Dall, 1873
- Lingula anatina Lamarck, 1801
- Lingula parva Smith, 1871
- Lingula reevei Davidson, 1880
- Lingula rostrum (Shaw, 1798)
- Lingula translucida Dall, 1920
- Lingula tumidula Reeve, 1841
literature
- Erich Thenius : Living fossils: old timers of the animal and plant world; Witnesses of the past . Munich: Pfeil, 2000, ISBN 3-931516-70-9 .
Web links
- Introduction to Lingulata University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP)
- WoRMS taxon details Lingula Bruguière, 1791