Geodiversitas
45 (2) - Pages 55-126This article presents the history of the collection of Jacques-Ludomir Combes (1824-1892), a pharmacist living in Fumel, who built up the most important collection of fossils and prehistoric objects from the Lot-et-Garonne department of his time. In 1880, Combes sold his collection to the Museum of Agen, where an entire room was devoted to its exhibition. Among the most remarkable specimens were numerous vertebrate remains from the Upper Kimmeridgian of Fumel and its surroundings, whose discoveries were closely linked to the intensive exploitation of the region’s cement quarries. These specimens were studied in the early 1900s by Henri-Émile Sauvage (1842-1917), who published a study on them in 1902. After the museum was restructured and renamed the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Agen, the natural history collections were relegated to storage. Long considered lost, dispersed, or even destroyed, many Kimmeridgian vertebrates of Fumel from the Combes collection have been rediscovered and are presented here for the first time since the work of Sauvage. This vertebrate assemblage, the richest known today in the Upper Jurassic of southwestern France, highlights a fauna composed of chondrichthyans (Hybodontiformes, Holocephali), actinopterygians (Pycnodontiformes, Ginglymodi, Halecomorphi, Pachycormiformes), turtles (Thalassochelydia), ichthyosaurs (Ophthalmosauridae), plesiosaurs (Cryptoclididae) and thalattosuchians (Teleosauroidea, Metriorhynchoidea).
History of palaeontology, Chondrichthyes, Actinopterygii, Testudines, Ichthyosauria, Plesiosauria, Thalattosuchia, Kimmeridgian, Fumel, lectotypification, new combinations