Propeamussiidae Abbott 1954

Family Propeamussiidae Abbott, 1954

Remarks. This family has been reported from fossil seep deposits only occasionally, but in four widely disparate areas of the globe: Greenland, Japan, New Zealand and USA. Campbell et al. (2008) reported the same specimen reported herein, and also tentatively identified it as belonging to the genus Parvamussium Sacco, 1897. Kiel (2006, 2010) reported tentative specimens of Catillopecten Iredale, 1939, and Propeamussium Gregorio, 1884, respectively, from Oligocene seeps of the Lincoln Creek Formation, north-western USA. The latter of these appears to be the most closely related to the specimen of this study. All other reports of the family in the seep fossil record have been of the genus Propeamussium. Kelly et al. (2000) provided a single report of an indeterminate species of the genus from the late Barremian Kuhnpasset Beds, north-eastern Greenland. The other reports are all from the early Campanian Yasukawa site of the Yezo Group, northern Japan, in which Propeamussium yubarense (Yabe & Nagao, 1928) has been identified (Amano et al. 2007; Jenkins et al. 2007b; Kiel et al. 2008a). Propeamussium is also known from the Whaingaroan (early Oligocene) to the Tongaporutuan (late Miocene) in New Zealand but is not present in the modern day. The pectinids Delectopecten fosterianus (Powell, 1933) and Veprichlamys kiwaensis (Powell, 1933) are the morphologically closest species that have been reported from modern New Zealand hydrocarbon seeps (Baco et al. 2010).