2025/08/25 by Winston F. Ponder, Alex G. Cook, Sherri Donaldson +1 · 1 voice
Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Geological formations and processes #Geology and Paleoclimatology Research #Paleontology and Stratigraphy of Fossils
paper · doi:10.1080/13235818.2025.2543147
openalex publication_date 2025/08/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
The fossil record for Australian non-marine aquatic molluscs is poorly documented compared to extant taxa and spans ca. 370 million years. This is in part due to the rarity of suitable fossil deposits but also the result of palaeontological focus on vertebrate taxa. We assembled existing information and have summarised the taxonomy of the fossil non-marine aquatic molluscs recorded in the literature and added some additional records from museum collections. Included in the list of 175 taxa, are Mesozoic records from New Zealand (9 taxa) as at that time New Zealand was connected to Australia. The resulting checklist includes 24 families, 14 being gastropods comprising 107 species-group taxa and 10 families and 68 species-group taxa of bivalves. Of these, 85 are Quaternary (17 bivalve and 68 gastropod taxa), 34 Neogene-Paleogene (8 bivalve and 26 gastropod taxa), 54 are Mesozoic (42 bivalve and 12 gastropod taxa), and there are two Paleozoic taxa, a bivalve and a gastropod.