Vologdinella


Vologdinella is a poorly known genus of extinct animals of uncertain classification with small cylindrical shells. The animals are known from Middle Cambrian fossils from a Paleozoic limestone in the Chingiz Mountains of Kazakhstan. The genus was established by Russian paleontologist Zakhar Grigoryevich Balashov in 1962 for a single species, Vologdinella antiqua, which was originally described and illustrated as Orthoceras? antiquus by Aleksandr Grigoryevich Vologdin [ru] in 1931.

The genus was historically classified as a cephalopod, though it has since been removed from this group.[1][3] Vologdinella bears superficial resemblance to the Early Cambrian Volborthella. In the same work establishing the former genus, the two genera were classified within their own families – Vologdinellidae and Volborthellidae, respectively – within the order Volborthellida. Volborthella was later included in Agmata, an extinct phylum proposed by the paleontologist and geologist Ellis L. Yochelson [de]. Vologdinella was also considered for inclusion in the Agmata, or in questionable synonymy with Volborthella, but a later study determined that the genus was not related to them.[4][5]