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Estimating fossil biomass from skeletal mass in marine invertebrates

Palaeoecology uses the numerical abundance and the occurrence of species to evaluate the dynamics of past communities, but biomass – the quantity of soft tissue – is the critical currency needed to capture the flow and role of nutrients in modern ecosystems. Acquiring biomass data from fossil assemblages has, however, remained challenging, thus limiting the analysis of net secondary production in palaeocommunities. Prior models relate shell size or shell biovolume to fossil biomass. These models neglect shell fragments and, moreover, use units of biovolume (cm) that are not directly related to those of biomass (g), making the models difficult to tune and the coefficients highly specific. To remedy these shortcomings, I evaluate skeletal mass as a means of estimating the soft tissue biomass of fossil taxa, using ratios among biomass, skeletal mass and the total wet mass of living representatives of extant species, so that skeletal mass alone can be used to estimate grams of organic biomass. Data on total wet mass, organic carbon mass, and shell mass were acquired from more than 80 live‐collected individuals from eight families in three major, shelly macrobenthic groups (Mollusca, Brachiopoda, Arthropoda) and supplemented with counterpart data from the literature to increase taxonomic breadth. This new shell‐mass model provides more accurate and precise biomass estimates than models based on the linear dimensions of shells, expanding our ability to examine the interplay between organisms and their environments. □ Biomass, carbonate mass, fossil, macrofauna, organic carbon, skeletal mass.