Eocene tarpons from the North Sea region, Denmark and UK

Maria E. C. Leal; Bo P. Schultz; Henrik Madsen; Chiara Villa; Niels Lynnerup; Niels Jørgen Rosenkrants; Ulrich Veje; Niels Bonde

doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.1410v1

Eocene tarpons from the North Sea region, Denmark and UK

Maria E. C. Leal ¹, Bo P. Schultz², Henrik Madsen³, Chiara Villa⁴, Niels Lynnerup⁴, Niels Jørgen Rosenkrants⁵, Ulrich Veje⁵, Niels Bonde^2,6

1 Departamento de Geologia, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Fortaleza, CE, Brazil

2 Fur Museum, Muserum Salling, 7884 Fur, Denmark

3 Molermuseet, Sejerslev, Mors, Denmark

4 Laboratory of Biological Anthropology, Department of Forensic Medicine, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

5 Department of Neuroradiology, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus C, Denmark

6 Zoological Museum, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.1410v1

Published: 2015-09-30
Accepted: 2015-09-30

Subject Areas: Paleontology, Taxonomy, Zoology
Keywords: Elopiforms, Eocene, CT-scanning, 3D reconstruction, Fossil Lagerstätte

Copyright: © 2015 Leal et al.
Licence: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

Cite this article: Leal MEC, Schultz BP, Madsen H, Villa C, Lynnerup N, Rosenkrants NJ, Veje U, Bonde N. 2015. Eocene tarpons from the North Sea region, Denmark and UK. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1410v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1410v1

Abstract

There are very few tarpons (family Megalopidae) and other elopiforms (fam. Elopidae) recorded in the Tertiary. The records are mainly from the Eocene, and more abundant in the ‘North Sea Region’ in Early Eocene, as for instance the large Danish forms. They are also found in late Early Eocene in London Clay, in Late Eocene in Caucasia, and in Miocene of SE-Asia, although none were described from the famous Bolca fauna (early Mid Eocene). However, there is a large, still undescribed ‘tarpon-like’ fish in the Bolca Museum (obs. MECL & NB 2014). There are even fewer described from the long Cretaceous period, 4-5? genera, including the large Paraelops from Romualdo Formation, Araripe Basin, NE-Brazil, and a large undescribed megalopid from Tlayua, Pueblo, Mexico, both ‘Mid Cretaceous’. The oldest elopiforms are from Late Jurassic Solnhofen Limestone. The large Danish ‘tarpons’ come from ‘cementstones’ in Fur Formation (earliest Eocene, ca. 55 m.y.), and here we report an almost complete specimen which is ca. 110 cm long; however, big isolated scales found in this formation indicate fishes at least twice as big (comparable in size with the living Tarpon atlanticus - over 2½ m). This specimen has a heavy skull lacking the lower jaw, and is preserved in 3-D. It was split in the midline and acid prepared, being then CT-scanned in Aarhus and reconstructed in the Laboratory of Biological Anthropology, Copenhagen University to attempt precise, detailed comparisons with modern skulls and with the 3-D skulls preserved in concretions from the London Clay.

Author Comment

This abstract has been accepted for the 63rd Symposium for Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy (SVPCA) which was held in Southampton, UK on September 2015. It was presented as a poster (see supplementary material) and forms part of the SPPC/SVPCA 2015 Collection.