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The promotion and prevention of recoiling in a maximally snaillike vermetid gastropod: a case study for the centenary of Dollo's Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2016

Stephen Jay Gould  and
Betsey A. Robinson
Stephen Jay Gould
Affiliation:
Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Betsey A. Robinson
Affiliation:
Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
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Abstract

The Neogene species Petaloconchus sculpturatus presents a contradiction in terms, for it grows whorl “packages” of nearly perfect regularity, but ranks within the most geometrically irregular family of uncoiled gastropods, the Vermetidae. We perform a first biometric study of vermetids (only possible because sufficient regularity of growth permits us to number and identify whorls) to specify and characterize the factors on both sides of this “exquisite tension” between promotion and prevention of recoiling. Promoting factors include the older phyletic heritage of preserved dextral coiling, and the more immediate vermetid (or specifically petaloconchid) features of growth toward open spaces (where regular coiling might proceed in an unimpeded fashion); radular excision of discordant feeding tubes with shaping of the resulting scar so that growth may proceed in conformity with previous whorls; and locking of subsequent whorls upon a keel formed by longitudinal bead-rows of the previous whorl. Preventing factors include prominent phyletic heritage of all vermetids—maximal early irregularity enjoined by discordance between larval and subsequent growth (with teleoconch wrapping itself around the protoconch), thus precluding an ordered substrate to act as a foundation for regular whorl “packages” of intermediary growth—and a set of features specific to this lineage and acting as geometric constraints. In this category, we particularly document the exceedingly low rate of whorl expansion and the consequently wide umbilical space that produces a shell akin to winding a cylindrical coil of narrow-diameter rope around the periphery of a wide circular platform. This complex combination of promoting and preventing factors produces a shell that is tantalizingly close to fully regular, but cannot truly reattain this previous phyletic state—thus providing a fine example of Dollo's Law at the centenary of his formation of irreversibility.

Type
Research Article
Information
Paleobiology , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , Summer 1994 , pp. 368 - 390
Copyright
Copyright © The Paleontological Society 

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