The Cretaceous of Skåne

Cretaceous sediments

The Department of Palaeobiology has a large collection of invertebrate fossils from the Cretaceous period from Skåne, almost 43,000 specimens are registered in the database and the majority were collected during the first half of the 20th century.

Cretaceous sediments are found in Skåne mainly around Lake Ivö in the north-eastern part of Skåne in what is known as the Kristianstad Basin. In the southwestern parts of Skåne, the Cretaceous chalk layers are buried underground but come to light in quarries such as the Limhamn quarry in Malmö.

The collection is dominated by mussels

During the Cretaceous period, a rich fauna of invertebrates lived in a shallow and warm sea in Skåne. These included molluscs (mussels, snails and squids), brachiopods, echinoderms (sea urchins and starfish), moss animals (bryozoans), corals, sponges, annelids and crustaceans (barnacles and ghost shrimp) in the seas around Scania. All of these are represented in our collections from the Cretaceous of Skåne, but the collection is dominated by mussels, mainly oysters (Ostrea), scallops (Pecten) and Spondylus, and their extinct relative, the large Inoceramus. Belemnites, a type of squid, is also very common in the collection.