At that time, north-central Texas lay beneath a warm, shallow epicontinental sea connected to the broader Western Interior Seaway, an environment ideal for shelled invertebrates to flourish.
Aporrhais is a thick-shelled sea snail, part of a lineage well adapted to life on carbonate seafloors. Its inflated, smoothly rounded whorls and robust form suggest a slow-moving grazer or detritivore, creeping across soft sediments in calm, sunlit waters.
The pale colouration you see today reflects mineral replacement during burial, with the original aragonitic shell long since altered to limestone.
The Goodland Formation is famous for its diverse fossil assemblage. Alongside gastropods, collectors and researchers regularly find ammonites (including forms such as Douvilleiceras), bivalves like oysters and rudists, echinoids (sea urchins), corals, and occasional crustaceans. Together, these fossils paint a vivid picture of a thriving Cretaceous reef-adjacent ecosystem.
Exposures of the Goodland around Fort Worth have been known and collected since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, often through quarrying and construction cuts. Early geological and paleontological work in the region was carried out by figures such as Robert T. Hill, W. S. Adkins, and T. W. Stanton, whose studies helped establish the stratigraphy and fossil content of the Texas Cretaceous.
Since then, generations of professional paleontologists and dedicated local collectors have continued to document and refine our understanding of this richly fossiliferous formation.
This specimen was collected by Jack Whittles in the 1990s, shared with the Pacific Museum of the Earth (the precursor museum to the one now at UBC, and then shared with me...)