Do not eat articulate brachiopods.  This can provide a useful proof of the advantages of having some knowledge of conchology.  I heard a story about a biologist in the Puget Sound area who was collecting with a non-biologist friend.  He found one of the local articulates and tried to explain the difference between bivalves and brachiopods.  The friend derided this as intellectual pretension, swallowed it raw to prove his point, and turned somewhat green.

Inarticulate brachipods, however, are not unusual as a human dietary item in Asia.  Brachiopods are moderately distant relatives of mollusks.  Along with annelids and other, more obscure, worms, plus a few other phyla, the molllusks and brachipods make up the group Trochozoa or Lophotrochozoa.  Arthropods, nematodes and certain other worms are more distant relatives, as is the echinoderm-vertebrate group.

I believe that some of the Field Guide to the Seashore types of books have the common Newfoundland brachiopod identified in them.  My books are at home.

Recent workers have found differences between the earliest lingulide brachiopods and more modern ones, so Lingula is not quite so long-lived as many references claim.  It still has respectable antiquity, but many protobranch bivalve genera are probably at least as old.

    Dr. David Campbell
    Old Seashells
    46860 Hilton Dr #1113
    Lexington Park MD 20653 USA
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That is Uncle Joe, taken in the masonic regalia of a Grand Exalted Periwinkle of the Mystic Order of Whelks-P.G. Wodehouse, Romance at Droigate Spa




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