Image: Inoceramus steenstrup, world's largest fossil mollusk

Description: ___ Largest Bivalve in the World (from signage) A shell of a bivalve mollusc that was found in 1952 in the valley Qilakitsoq on the Nuussuaq peninsula in western Greenland. The scientific name of these bivalves is Inoceramus steenstrupi. They lived between 83 and 63 million years ago. These are the largest bivalves ever to exist. It is thought that they lived in an oxygen-poor environment and that they layed unattached on the sea floor filtering plankton and detritus from the water. The shell is 178 cm (70 inch) long. The other half of the bivalve is in the Geological Museum of Copenhagen. ___ On display at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources. Link to this new Institute filled with many hallway displays at www.natur.gl/ hey now, "moi" for scale and a line-up of 2014 Nuuk Geoscience Workshop geologists waiting for their turn with the mighty mollusk. The Nuuk display is geotagged instead of the Cretaceous fossil-bearing rock formation on the opposite side of Greenland. Photo by H. Steenkamp with permission for my photo-shop'd posting.
Title: Inoceramus steenstrup, world's largest fossil mollusk
Credit: as tall as me, world's largest fossil mollusk
Author: Mike Beauregard from Nunavut, Canada
Usage Terms: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0
License: CC BY 2.0
License Link: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0
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