834
Journal of Paleontology 92(5):804–837
Figure 15. Fragmentary or poorly preserved Conidae of indeterminate taxonomic assignment; all specimens are from UF locality YN020 and were photographed under regular light. (1, 2) UF 256536, SL 42.8mm; (3) UF 271042, SL 25.6mm; (4) UF 271040, SL 27.4mm; (5) UF 259805, SL 26.7mm; (6) UF 271036, SL 13.5mm. Scale bar to left of (1) is 10mm and pertains to all specimens.
scales. Indeed, the four rarest species were represented by a total of only 11 specimens and likely would not have been collected without intensive, taxonomically focused sampling conducted by multiple individuals. Five additional specimens found at YN020, all of which are fragmentary or poorly preserved, may represent additional, and possibly undescribed, biodiversity. Following the argument in Hendricks (2015), which suggested that at least three specimens are necessary to adequately char- acterize a new species of fossil cone snail, these are left unde- scribed pending discovery of additional, better-preserved specimens. They are illustrated in Figure 15, however, to facil- itate future comparative study should additional material becomes available. Many thousands of years likely separate the geologically
oldest cone snail specimen found at UF locality YN020 from the youngest and, as noted above, water depth likely fluctuated on the scale of tens of meters during the interval in which the study strata were deposited (see Hendy, 2013; Anderson et al., 2017). For these reasons, and because of the non-standardized sam- pling protocol employed, it is not possible to determine which of the 10 species documented here from YN020 were members of the same ecological communities during particular intervals of time. It is possible, for instance, that the total study sample is derived from multiple depth gradients, which captured different components of the total Conidae fauna as water depth shifted over time. This might also explain why some of the fossil Conidae documented from the Gatun Formation by Woodring (1970) were not found at YN020.
Considered as a whole, however, the total biodiversity
of the UF locality YN020 Conidae fauna can be considered moderate when compared to other recently documented tropical American assemblages. For example, Landau et al. (2016) recently documented eight species from the Miocene Cantaure Formation of Venezuela (including Conus aemulator; see above), and Hendricks (2015) demonstrated that three late Miocene and early Pliocene coral reef-associated assemblages from the Dominican Republic were represented by 14–16 species, though collectively the three assemblages represent at least 28 different species. Today, ~19 species of Conidae are found off the Atlantic coast of Panama (data compiled from Kohn, 2014) and at least 32 off the Pacific coast of the country (Tenorio et al., 2012). While the modern fauna appears more
diverse than that of YN020, suggesting an increase in diversi- fication since the late Miocene, the modern counts are sampled across a wider geographical range and presumably a greater range of sampling depths, so direct comparisons are somewhat problematic. While the biodiversity of the Conidae fauna documented
here from UF locality YN020 is moderate, it is phylogenetically diverse. The quality of preservation—particularly ancient coloration patterns revealed by UV light—allows six of the 10 species found at this locality to be assigned with confidence to six different clades (subgenera; see Puillandre et al., 2014, 2015) of extant Conidae: Conasprella (Ximeniconus), Conus (Stephanoconus), Conus (Dauciconus), Conus (Pyruconus I), Conus (Pyruconus II), and Conus (Spuriconus). The lower
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