First record of a fossil serpulid tube (Polychaeta: Serpulidae) from the Miocene sediments of Sakhalin (NW Pacific)

A fossil tube of a polychaete from the family Serpulidae Rafinesque, 1815 was found during an expedition of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1998 in the western part of Sakhalin Island. The fossil is dated to the Middle–Late Miocene. There were no previous records of fossil serpulids in the area. Based on the examination of the morphology and microstructure of the tube, it was established that the fossil belongs either to the genus Chitinopoma Levinsen 1884 or to Filogranula (Langerhans, 1884) and is very similar to the tube of the species Chitinopoma rzhavskii (Kupriyanova, 1993) which currently inhabits the northeast of the Pacific Ocean.