TEAM PALEO : Mystery Marine Mollusk

Dickson Mounds is currently in possession of an extensive Type Collection- a group of items from local archaeological sites- that was in desperate need of resorting. We pulled sizeable drawers from an entire wall of shelves that was twenty feet long by four feet high. The drawers were supposed to be carefully sorted by item type, but instead were extremely jumbled- replicas in the bone drawer, bones in the rock drawer, pottery and stone tools with the replicas, etc. We started by sorting by type. Anything bone went into one pile, anything shell went into another. In a third pile, we had rock items, and in a fourth was pottery. In the end, one item was left unsorted. It looked like a 6 inch potato bug with its plates pulled off. For many weeks we puzzled over what it could be. Finally, Team Paleo brought it to our geology professor, who told us it was a Chiton- a shelled mollusc with a big foot that suctioned onto rocks.