Excavations in the Bruges’ Medieval outer ports of Hoeke and Monnikerede, located along the Zwin tidal inlet, revealed numerous rounded cobbles of exotic geological provenance among which were two specimens of remarkable mineralogical composition. An interdisciplinary study combining archeological, geological, petrographic-geochemical, and historical research has demonstrated their Mediterranean, i.e., Italian, provenance. A first stone is identified as Carrara marble originating from the alluvial fans of the Apuan Alps, deposited along the Versilian coast near the Renaissance towns of Lucca, Pisa, and Genoa. The second cobble is determined as a bioclastic calcarenite limestone from the Apulian shores. Both finds are interpreted as part of the non-saleable ballast once put in the holds of Italian carracks and galleys that touched the Flemish ports during the late thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. As such, both seemingly ordinary objects constitute a rare material and lithological testimony of an important late Medieval commercial network between the Mediterranean and North Sea coasts. Furthermore, the very rare occurrence of these Mediterranean cobbles compared to thousands of Scando-Baltic and Anglo-Scottish ballast stones in the whole of the Bruges outer harbor area can be related to differences in maritime traffic frequency and sheer commercial volumes. Also, the nature of the ballast itself and the ballasting procedures are important, the whole making Mediterranean ballast stones considerably less detectable in the Bruges’ harbors than their North-European equivalents.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2022
The origin of tetrapods is one of the key events in vertebrate history. The oldest tetrapod body fossils are Late Devonian (Frasnian–Famennian) in age, most of them consisting of rare isolated bone elements. Here we describe tetrapod remains from two Famennian localities from Belgium: Strud, in the Province of Namur, and Becco, in the Province of Liège. The newly collected material consists of an isolated complete postorbital, fragments of two maxillae, and one putative partial cleithrum, all from Strud, and an almost complete maxilla from Becco. The two incomplete maxillae and cleithrum from Strud, together with the lower jaw previously recorded from this site, closely resemble the genus Ichthyostega, initially described from East Greenland.The postorbital from Strud and the maxilla from Becco do not resemble the genus Ichthyostega. They show several derived anatomical characters allowing their tentative assignment to a whatcheeriid-grade group. The new tetrapod records show that there are at least two tetrapod taxa in Belgium and almost certainly two different tetrapod taxa at Strud. This locality joins the group of Devonian tetrapod-bearing localities yielding more than one tetrapod taxon, confirming that environments favourable to early tetrapod life were often colonized by several tetrapod taxa.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2016
