Brachiopod fauna from Longá Formation (Upper Devonian), State of Piauí, NE Brazil

ABSTRACT

In the Parnaíba Basin, Devonian marine invertebrate macrofossils occur mainly in the Pimenteira Formation (Picos and Passagem Members), and are scarcer in the Longá Formation, which has poor preservation of the samples and a limited amount of material available to be analysed. There has been, to date, no description or proper taxonomic classification of its body fossils, despite the limited diversity. Brachiopod taxonomy is reviewed and analysed herein for the first time. It was possible to describe a new species from the order Orthotetida, belonging to the genus Schellwienella, named Schellwienella justinianoi n. sp. We also confirmed the presence of the inarticulate brachiopods ‘Lingula’? and Orbiculoidea?, which have been tentatively identified by some authors. We emphasise the importance of the conservation of this Brazilian Geoheritage both in situ and ex situ. Future field studies are needed to document the entire biota of the Longá Formation, to elucidate the palaeobiogeographic affinities of Devonian invertebrate fossils of Brazil, and related faunas in South America, and to test ideas of marine connections between these areas. These studies provide insights regarding the impacts caused by late Devonian (Kellwasser and Hangenberg) biocrisis on the Brazilian fauna, and its palaeoecological aspects.

http://www.zoobank.org:act:1CC9A9C8-D6A6-4BD7-85AD-3853FEE29323

KEYWORDS:

• Lingula
• Orbiculoidea
• Parnaíba Basin
• Schellwienella
• Schuchertella

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Msc. Rodrigo da Rocha Machado for providing access to the material from the Longá Formation deposited in the Museu de Ciências da Terra (MCTer); to Dr. James Zambito and an anonymous reviewer for their kind, careful and helpful revisions, which resulted in a much improved manuscript. To Msc. Rodrigo Tinoco Figueroa for helping with the photographs and to Mr. Justiniano de Souza Martins for giving permission to access the Fazenda Barreiras and for joining the UNIRIO’s team in 2011 to collect the studied fossils. Unfortunately he passed away in 2018, and we would like to honor his memory with this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) under grant [118716/2019-0 to J.M.P.R.].