DISCOVERY AND ROCK-SOLID EVIDENCE: EXAMPLES FROM HIGH-LATITUDE NORTH PACIFIC MOLLUSCAN PALEONTOLOGY

Regardless of technological advancement, which it undoubtedly has benefited from in many ways, paleontology today remains, as ever, the true science of discovery. Despite new ways of analyzing them, fossils “out in the wild” are still the objects we must discover and study. There are not many science fields today in which a completely unexpected but quite literally "rock-solid" find comes from the outdoors. The serendipitous discovery of a single, often small fossil from a key locality can dramatically change our understanding and provide new, often unexpected insights into the origin, dispersal and extinction patterns of once-living organisms. These finds can also become a driving force for further research by raising questions and hypotheses to test. Several examples from the realm of high-latitude North Pacific Cenozoic marine mollusks that go above and beyond the discovery and description of new taxa demonstrate the impact on our understanding of the origins, timing, biogeographic and environmental history of lineages, and regional extinction patterns. Discovery of the gastropod Tyrannoberingius in the Miocene of Alaska provided unexpected clues about evolutionary radiation of the entire subfamily that paralleled and for a while kept pace with its sister group in the Southern Hemisphere. Discovery of the gastropods Arctomelon in the Eocene, Conus in the Paleocene of northwestern Kamchatka, and Admete and Urahorosphaera in the Paleocene of northern Japan shed light on the ancient origins of tropical and cold-water taxa that are thriving in the ocean today. Discovery of the boreal clam Astarte in the Miocene of Alaska led to precisely dating the first opening of Bering Strait.