THE FOSSILS OF MATESE
"These fossils are documents, handed down to us by Nature, which, in a kind of dialogue with the Past, bear witness to the lives of creatures that lived in the sea that once covered what is now the Matese.
Observing and studying these "documents" is rather like reliving that Past which urges us to meditate on many problems of widespread interest, such as those concerning the origin of Life on Earth and the evolution of living beings through time.
THE ERA OF THE EARTH
(in yellow the era of Matese)
The fossils of the Matese, which are varied and plentiful, even though they are only partly representative of all the living creatures that inhabited the sea of the carbonate platform, include Ichthyolites, Reptiles, Amphibia, Crustacea, Bivalvia, Gastropoda, Brachiopoda, Anthozoa, Echinodermata, Porifera, Anellida, Foraminiferida, Algae.
The Bivalves prevailed with the Rudists which, being so widespread, gave their name to almost all the groups of fauna of the subsequent paleobiological eras.
The general term Rudists is used to indicate certain families of Bivalves which developing their structures in specialized forms (a fixed valve at the bottom that is generally larger than the other which acts as an operculum), lived in particular shallow sea environments in the old Tethys of the Mesozoic era a sea that existed between the two supercontinents Gondwanaland and Laurasia. In particular the Rudists lived in neritic environments of tropical sea, with shallow clear waters, well lit and warm, without appreciable variations in temperature and salt content, well oxygenated and with moderate currents.
In the Matese context the living environments of the Rudists were distiguished by carbonate platform sea beds (reefs and back reefs), where waters circulated freely."
Michele Mainelli