Family Siboglinidae Caullery, 1914 (vestimentiferan)

‘Troodos wrinkled tubes’

(Fig. 10D, E)

1999a vestimentiferan worm tubes Little, Cann, Herrington, & Morisseau: 1028, fig. 2e.

Material. Kambia 4051, 4061, 6061, t3; Kapedhes 204b, 2101, worm tubes with walls ornamented by transverse and longitudinal wrinkles. Collected by C. T. S. Little.

Occurrence. Massive sulphide deposits. Troodos Ophiolite, Cyprus. Turonian, Late Cretaceous (Oudin & Constantinou 1984; Little et al. 1999a).

Description. Generally straight or slightly curving pyritic tubes 1.2–4.5 mm in diameter, which do not show signs of having been flexible and are not attached to other tubes (Fig. 10D, E). Whether tubes taper cannot be assessed with certainty due to the short length of preserved fragments. Tubes do not have collars, and instead possess fine transverse and longitudinal wrinkles on their surfaces, with the transverse wrinkles often being more pronounced and fairly regular (Fig. 10D). Longitudinal wrinkles are fine and occasionally bifurcating (Fig. 10E). One tube specimen has a smaller tube preserved within it.

Remarks. These tubes are resolved among siboglinids by both cladistic and cluster analyses (Figs 22–24), as a result of the fine, bifurcating longitudinal wrinkles as well as the fine transverse wrinkles which they possess. The features above are not observed on serpulid tubes, which sometimes possess coarse longitudinal wrinkles. The longitudinal wrinkles of chaetopterid tubes are often coarser (Kiel & Dando 2009), and have not been observed to be crosscut by fine transverse wrinkles. We therefore suggest that the most likely builders of these tubes are vestimentiferans, which do exhibit such ornamentation patterns (cf. Ridgeia piscesae tubes, Fig. 15G).