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1 Department of Earth Sciences, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EQ, UK emh21{at}cus.cam.ac.uk
2 Department of Zoology, The Natural History Museum, London SW7 5BD, UK
3 British Antarctic Survey, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0ET, UK
Bivalves have been important members of marine communities since the early Palaeozoic, in terms of both their numerical abundance and diversity. They are particularly prevalent in shallow shelf sediments, but they have also conquered the intertidal zone as well as the deep sea, where they are successful predators and key components of some vent communities. They have also invaded freshwater systems a number of times, where today they are important (and costly) foulers. In terms of general community structure, bivalves are important as prey items for a range of different predatory groups, and as major space occupiers, particularly on hard substrata where space may be limited.
The abundance and diversity of both Recent and fossil bivalves have made them attractive subjects for both zoologists and palaeontologists, and both disciplines have contributed to the present system of classification and the understanding of their phylogenetic relationships. However, somewhat inevitably, the focus of the two groups has been rather different, with zoologists concentrating on anatomical characters such as those associated with the gills and stomach, whilst palaeontologists have necessarily dwelt on hard-part characters such as dentition and shell microstructure. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that convergence and parallelism is rife within the class and more integrated approaches are necessary to unravel these.
The last major attempt to integrate the palaeontological and zoological approaches to bivalve evolution was more than 20 years ago, at the Royal Society of London meeting in 1977. The resulting volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
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This 250-word extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
