Where: Westmoreland County, Virginia (38.2° N, 76.8° W)

• Paleocoordinates: 39.7° N, 70.8° W (Wright 2013)

• coordinate estimated from map

When: Calvert Beach Member (Calvert Formation), Serravallian (13.8 - 11.6 Ma)

• Age after Kellogg (1968), but see (Marx & Fordyce below. Marx and Fordyce follow Case (1904) in suggesting that Metopocetus durinasus is from the St Marys Formation, but this seems unsubstantiated. Kellogg (1968) clearly states that this fossil is from Nomini Cliffs, which only exposes Zones 14-16, which are Langhian in age.

•

•USNM 8518 was collected from “a Miocene marl from near the mouth of the Potomac river” [90: 143]. Subsequent authors interpreted this description of the type locality to refer to either the Calvert Formation [93, 163] or the St. Mary‟s Formation [164], implying either a Langhian or a Serravallian age, respectively. To date, no other cetotheriid remains from the Calvert Formation have been described, but at least two cetotheriids (Cephalotropis coronatus and “Cetotherium” megalophysum; see above) occur in the Little Cove Point Member of the St Mary‟s Formation. This, together with the fact that the suggestion of the St Mary‟s formation as a potential source unit was published just eight years after the original description of the species, might support the origin of M. durinasus from the Little Cove Point Member. The latter has been strontium dated to the early Tortonian (11.7–10.0 Ma) [48, 49], which is the age assumed here pending the emergence of better-constrained occurrence data. (Marx & Fordyce, 2015).

•

•Zones 14-16A are regarded as Serravallian in age.

• group of beds-level stratigraphic resolution

Environment/lithology: foreshore; brown, yellow, sandy claystone

Size class: macrofossils

Primary reference: M. D. Uhen. 2007. USNM Chesapeake Group Cetacean Collection Data. [M. Uhen/M. Uhen]more details

Purpose of describing collection: general faunal/floral analysis

PaleoDB collection 71798: authorized by Mark Uhen, entered by Mark Uhen on 10.05.2007, edited by Kristin Feoli and Samantha Yost

Creative Commons license: CC0 (CC0)