Paleobiological Studies Honoring Norman D. Newell.

Edited by Paul A. Johnston and James W. Haggart.

1998. xiv +461pp. University of Calgary press. ISBN 1-55238-005-x $59.95 (hardcovers) and ISBN 1-55238-004-1 $44.95 (softcovers). Outside Canada, prices are in$US. Shipping overseas $9.00.

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In autumn 1995 a number of bivalve workers gathered at the Fifth Canadian Paleontology Conference in Drumheller for a special symposium on a variety of topics concerning the evolution of the Bivalvia. This must have been a great opportunity for bivalve workers to meet and listen to one anotherís work. This book is the publication that stems from that meeting, although perhaps bizarrely over one third of the 30 papers printed in it are by authors who do not appear to have been present at the conference. As conference volumes go the lag between the conference and the appearance of the volume is not too bad.

The opening paper, by Thomas Waller, is clearly the highlight of the volume. Wallerís 1978 (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series B 284: 345-365) paper on the cladistic analysis of the pteriomorphs has been oft quoted and has been a key contribution in the post-Treatise understanding of bivalve classification. This new paper has ambitious coverage seeking to examine the relationship of the bivalves to other molluscan classes, the relationships of the major bivalves clades and a more detailed analysis of the Pteriomorpha. This will clearly be of great interest to most palaeontologists and neontologists with an interest in bivalve phylogeny, although I suspect that few will be surprised to see widely (but not universally) accepted relationships, such as the division of the bivalves and the rostroconchs from the other molluscan classes, supported. There is an interesting conflict here between the results of the detailed pteriomorph study, where Waller suggests a close relationship between the oysters and the scallops, and another paper in this volume by Campbell et al. based on molecular methodologies, which places the oysters with the pterioids. There are to my mind a number of questions about the way in which Waller has presented his work. It has all the appearance of a cladistic analysis but nowhere is there any mention of how the analysis was undertaken, how the apomorphies were determined nor a character matrix. It is a central tenet of science that all its ëexperimentsí should be repeatable but this is unfortunately not the case here.

The remaining 29 papers cover a very broad range of bivalve topics. The editors have taken perhaps the rather odd decision of ordering them by author alphabetically. This robs the volume of some cohesion, for example there are more than one paper on rudists, oysters, inoceramids etc but because their authors did not bear similar surnames they are distantly placed. It would certainly have been quite easy to break the papers into a number of sections.

As with any conference volume the quality of the papers presented varies enormously. Some, for example the suggestion by Johnston and Collom that inoceramids are pteriomorphs will certainly provoke citation and discussion for a long while to come. Others may slip in to the literature as padding. Obviously different papers will appeal to different people. Apart from the several papers which deal with evolutionary relationships between higher bivalve taxa (Waller; Campbell et al., and Frischer et al.), I was taken with the paper by Carter and Seed that seems to show (at least semi-quantitatively) that the volume of calcite employed in the shells of Mytilus edulis may be inversely related to water temperature, and also by Savazziís careful study of the enigmatic pectinid Pedum. There is a salutory lesson in the problems of hardpart convergence as Johnston and Zhang use new better preserved material to shepherd the Devonian bivalve Sinodora away from the Anomalodesmata and into the palaeoheterodont Trigonoida. Seilacher takes a rather popularist approach to rudists, regarding them as aberrant "dinosaurs" who got too used to the optimum conditions in which they could flourish and do their own thing, such that when the going got tough and the environment changed they foundered - harking back to Schindewolf's typolysis.

The volume has been dedicated to Norman Newell, a man with a long, distinguished and continuing career in bivalve palaeontology. Having such a broad interest in bivalves, Newell cannot but be pleased with this volume. Indeed this book with its broad coverage should be of interest to most bivalve workers, palaeontologist or neontologists. It is quirky, but conference volumes are and patience will overcome the strange paper order. The index is good and useful. The price is not bad too, but a warning. If you are considering buying it apply direct to the Canadian distributors. In trying to obtain it from the UK and European address given on the publicity material I discovered that that firm had never even heard of it!

Liz Harper, University of Cambridge