Goniatites are much more abundant and speciose in sediments that represent epicontinental seas than they are in those that represent the open ocean. Within these inland seas, goniatites' greatest abundance and diversity appears to have been achieved in deeper offshore and basinal environments rather than in nearshore environments. Known nearshore (e.g., lagoonal) occurrences have generally been ascribed to wash-in of shells from offshore waters. Due to lack of strong evidence for any particular life mode (e.g., benthic nektonic, planktonic), it remains unclear what resources goniatites were capitalizing on in these offshore environments. Only a few goniatites' full trophic apparatuses have ever been described, and reports of stomach contents in these creatures' fossils remain questionable at best. However, goniatites clearly lacked the calcified jaw apparatuses developed in later ammonites; this has been cited as evidence against their having a durophagous (shell-crushing) diet. Distribution Goniatites are found in North America, Europe, North Africa and Australasia where they are used as index fossils in age determination and stratigraphic correlation. However, they seem to occur mostly in areas which at the time would have been tropical to subtropical. Almost any fossil-bearing limestone or shale from inland seas of the late Paleozoic tropics or subtropics is likely to yield some goniatites. In the USA, such rocks are found from Maine, New York, and Virginia and in every state west to Nebraska and south to Texas and Alabama; as well as in parts of almost every western state (with the exception of North Dakota, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii). Notable goniatite occurrences are found in certain limestones in western part of Ireland (particularly Slieve Anierin) which are packed with beautifully preserved goniatite fossils. They are also found in marine bands of the Carboniferous coal measures in Europe and in marine rocks of the Pennsylvanian period in Arkansas. Large numbers of goniatites also occur in rocks from the Devonian period of Morocco. References Miller, Furnish, and Schindewolf (1964); Paleozoic Ammonoidea, in the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology, Part L, Ammonoidea; Geological Society of America and Univ of Kansas Press (1964) Saunders et al. (1999) Evolution of Complexity in Paleozoic Ammonoid Sutures, Supplementary Material. (http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/1043099.dtl) Middle Devonian first appearances Lopingian extinctions Fossil taxa described in 1884