A highly diverse siliceous sponge fauna (Porifera: Hexactinellida, Demospongiae) from the Eocene of north-eastern Italy: systematics and palaeoecology
Creators: name: Frisone, Viviana
name: Pisera, Andrzej
name: Preto, Nereo
Publisher: name: Taylor & Francis
Year: 2016
Subjects: subject: Biochemistry
subject: Medicine
subject: Molecular Biology
subject: 59999 Environmental Sciences not elsewhere classified
subject: FOS: Earth and related environmental sciences
subject: FOS: Earth and related environmental sciences
subject: 39999 Chemical Sciences not elsewhere classified
subject: FOS: Chemical sciences
subject: FOS: Chemical sciences
subject: Ecology
subject: FOS: Biological sciences
subject: FOS: Biological sciences
subject: Sociology
subject: FOS: Sociology
subject: FOS: Sociology
subject: 69999 Biological Sciences not elsewhere classified
subject: Cancer
subject: Inorganic Chemistry
subject: Computational Biology

description: A siliceous sponge fauna, consisting of more than 900 specimens, is described from an early Lutetian tuffite horizon in the Chiampo Valley, Lessini Mountains, north-eastern Italy. Thirty-two taxa (15 Hexactinellida, 17 Demospongiae) are determined and illustrated, belonging to 24 genera, two of which are new (<i>Rigonia</i> gen. nov. and <i>Coronispongia</i> gen. nov.). Among these, 10 new species are proposed: <i>Stauractinella eocenica</i> sp. nov., <i>Rigonia plicata</i> gen. et sp. nov., <i>Hexactinella clampensis</i> sp. nov., <i>Camerospongia visentinae</i> sp. nov., <i>C. tuberculata</i> sp. nov., <i>Toulminia italica</i> sp. nov., <i>Coronispongia confossa</i> gen. et sp. nov., <i>Cavispongia scarpai</i> sp. nov., <i>Corallistes multiosculata</i> sp. nov. and <i>Bolidium bertii</i> sp. nov. Of the genera identified at Chiampo, 14 range back to the Cretaceous, three to the Jurassic and one to the Triassic, while six are still extant. The studied fauna shows affinities with sponges from the Eocene of Spain and the Cretaceous of Germany. The sponge fossils are uncompressed and bodily preserved, but the original siliceous skeleton is dissolved and substituted by calcite. Delicate attachments can be nevertheless documented: some sponges attached to a hard substrate by encrustation, while others were anchored on soft sediments by root-like structures. The presence of different modes of attachment suggests heterogeneous substrate conditions. Small, possibly young, sponges are recorded too. The sponge fauna is essentially autochthonous and lived in the middle-outer part of a carbonate ramp, where it formed clusters. This study extends the geographical and stratigraphical range of many sponge taxa, including <i>Camerospongia</i>, <i>Toulminia</i>, <i>Ozotrachelus</i> and <i>Bolidium</i>, previously documented only from the Cretaceous. The Recent calcified demosponge genus <i>Astrosclera</i> is reported here in the Cenozoic for the first time, having been reported previously in the Triassic only. Additionally, this study documents the second worldwide occurrence of the Recent sphinctozoan genus <i>Vaceletia</i> in the Palaeogene, formerly recorded exclusively in Australia. http://zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:B3466955-8E20-429A-89BE-42BAEB4002E8