Webster and Hageman—Buenellus chilhoweensis n. sp. (lower Cambrian Chilhowee Group)


447 In 1893 Walcott revisited Chilhowee Mountain with


mapper Arthur Keith (Laurence and Palmer, 1963; Yochelson, 1998), and the two collected additional fossils. Keith’s (1895) report was the first to explicitly state that fossils had been found in the Murray Shale. He (Keith, 1895, p. 3) noted that brachiopods and trilobites had been discovered in the Murray Shale “on the east side of Little River Gap and on the crest of the mountain above Montvale Springs,” the latter site being the present-day Murray Gap area (see Appendix). He did not specify which of the two localities yielded the trilobites and which yielded the brachiopods, or whether both fossil types occurred at each locality. Museum documentation shows that Walcott’s original trilobite (Fig. 4.8) was sourced from the Little River Gap area. Brachiopods had not been mentioned in Walcott’s (1890, 1891) original faunal lists, so that occurrence appears to have been a novel find of the 1893 trip. More (and perhaps better) bradoriid specimens were also found on the 1893 trip: Laurence and Palmer (1963, p. C54) found museum documentation stating that the bradoriid specimens described by Resser (1938) “were collected by Walcott and Keith in 1893.” The purported age and source of Walcott’s and Keith’s


collections were subsequently cast into doubt by several authors. Referring to the collection of olenelline trilobites and Isoxys chilhoweanus from the Little River Gap locality, Resser (1933, p. 746) stated that “(t)he circumstances surrounding the collection of these fossils cause some doubt as to their stratigraphic position.” Skepticism over the stratigraphic provenance of the fossils was repeated by Grabau (1936). Resser (1938, p. 25) later stated that the material from the Little River Gap and above Montvale Springs was of “uncertain age” because the genera—therein listed as Hyolithes Eichwald, 1840; Isoxys Walcott, 1890; and Indianites Ulrich and Bassler, 1931 —“appear rather to be Middle Cambrian” (the occurrence of the diagnostically early Cambrian olenelline trilobite was not mentioned). Stose and Stose (1944) expressed doubt as to whether the


Figure 3. Maps for localities on Chilhowee Mountain, Blount County, Tennessee, U.S.A., discussed in text. (1) Little River Gap area, near Walland. (2) Murray Gap area, near Montvale Springs. Walland (in 1) is located ~15.3km (9.5 miles) northeast of Murray Gap (in 2); general location of these two maps within Tennessee shown by star symbol in Figure 1. Locality abbreviations: CM, newly discovered fossiliferous exposures on Chilhowee Mountain, including within Nichols Shale (CM1), lowest few meters of Murray Shale (CM2), and Buenellus-bearing site within Murray Shale (CM3); LRG, classic Little River Gap roadside exposure; MG1, base of Murray Shale exposed alongside disused bridleway; MG2 and MG3, roadcuts through Murray Shale collected by Laurence and Palmer (1963) and Wood and Clendening (1982); MG4, roadside exposure at intersection of Happy Valley Road and Flats Road. Maps created with TOPO! software (©National Geographic Society, 2002).


20 feet above the quartzite in the upper shale bed” (Walcott, 1891, p. 302), and that Skolithos burrows were present in the sandstone underlying the fossil-bearing shale (Walcott, 1890, p. 626; 1891, p. 154). Those descriptions could apply to either the Murray Shale (above the Nebo Quartzite) or a shaly interval within the Helenmode Formation (above the Hesse Quartzite).


collections mentioned by Keith (1895) came from the Murray Shale. Their skepticism stemmed from ambiguities over the mapping in the Little River Gap and from the fact that all other Chilhowee Group fossils had otherwise been reported only from the uppermost beds marking the transition into the Shady Dolomite (see references above). Those observations led Stose and Stose (1944, p. 388) to hypothesize that the fossils from the Little River Gap locality might have been sourced from the “transitional beds at the top of the Hesse” (i.e., the Helenmode Formation) rather than the Murray Shale. That hypothesis was subsequently repeated by King (1949, p. 520). Later, King et al. (1952, p. 15; also King and Ferguson, 1960) explicitly stated that Walcott’s collections from Little River Gap had actually been sourced from the Helenmode Formation rather than the Murray Shale, a conclusion also reached by Neuman and Nelson (1965, p. D28–D29) (see Appendix for further details). However, despite his reservations over the stratigraphic provenance of the fossils from Little River Gap, King (1949, p. 520) acknowledged that the fossil collection from the crest of Chilhowee Mountain above Montvale Springs mentioned by Keith (1895) was almost certainly from the Murray Shale and represented the stratigraphically oldest occurrence of trilobites and brachiopods in the southern Appalachians. The occurrence


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