Hispanirhynchia cornea (Fischer in Davidson, 1886)

Hispanirhynchia cornea View in CoL (Fischer, in Davidson 1887)

Figures 11 View Figure 11 , 12 View Figure 12

Rhynchonella cornea Fischer , in Davidson (1887), p. 171–172, pl. 25, figs. 2–4.

Rhynchonella ( Hemithyris) cornea – Fischer & OEhlert (1891), p.

13–18, pl. 1, figs. 2a–u.

Hemithyris cornea – Dall (1920), p. 288–289.

Hispanirhynchia cornea – Thomson (1927), p. 159–161, fig. 49.

Description: Shell low equibiconvex to inflated, but with flattened top in anterior profile. Outline elongate subtriangular. Ventral umbo rather short and incurved beak-shaped. Rectimarginate to faintly unisulcate anterior and straight lateral commissure. Triangular, disjunct deltidial plates more than halfway enclosing small to medium-sized pedicle opening. Short pedicle collar. Ornamentation of very fine, dense and radiating striation as well as concentric growth lines. Shell matrix impunctate. Colour light yellow to brownish. Teeth supported by dental plates. Subhorizontal inner hinge plates in dorsal valve connecting socket ridges with crural bases. Lophophore supported by short, thin crura. Sharp-edged short dorsal median septum. Maximum length 36 mm.

Depth range: 439–3645 m depth ( Cooper 1981a; Zezina 2010). Davidson (1887) gave the extremely shallow depth of 105 m off Southern Portugal for the syntype specimen sampled during the Talisman Expedition in 1883. However, as concluded by Emig (2016) this location is wrong and should have been the Talisman station off Morocco at 1050 m depth reported by Fischer & OEhlert (1891).

Temperature range: 6–12˚C ( Brand et al. 2003).

Salinity range: 35–36 ( Brand et al. 2003).

Geography: English Channel, off SW Ireland, south to the Azores, the Canary Islands and Sudan ( Fischer & OEhlert 1891; Brunton & Curry 1979; Cooper 1981a; Logan et al. 2007; Zezina 2014).

Remarks: Although the year of description is often given as 1886 since that is written on the first page of the paper, it was published in 1887.

No holotype was elected in the original description, but Emig (2016) has subsequently elected the Talisman station off Morocco at 1050 m depth as the type locality. Most type specimens from the Talisman expedition have lost their labelling according to Alvarez (2016), but based on the provided pictures it seems most likely that the bigger of the two specimens labelled ML-ZOO-MAL-00133 is identical with pl. 25, figure 2–2c of Davidson (1887) from the Talisman expedition. That would then be a candidate for election as a lectotype.