possibly a what is this stumper

ya i haven't added anything to my tank for years...... nor have I done a water change in probably 2 years. The softies hate it when I do a water change so I just left it and I am getting great growth. Weird stuff just kind of shows up lol. It's killing me to not know what it is as well. I'm sure its just some common oyster or clam or something. It would be cool if its something rare though :)

I had a roughly 8" abalone show up one day as well about 2 years ago from behind the rockwork. He ended up dying and I have a pretty good size shell off of him.

I would go in after it, but I have like a 2 foot toadstool that I don't want to make angry. He's kind of my prized possession honestly as dumb as that sounds. But he sits right on top of it and I don't really have a place to put him while I move everything around to get to it.

I have a snail as well that is about the size of my fist that I've had for I bet 10 years at least lol. He actually has the power to eat the coraline off the glass haha!
 
I envy the OP.

IMO, one of the best things about marine aquaria is finding critters you did not know you had (unless they destroy your other critters).

My setups are so old that only pods and worms live in them. That is the safe way, but boring as hell.

I enjoyed my tanks more when I had a plethora of weird inverts swimming/crawling in the refugiums. :(
 
I googled around for a hairy brown pteriomorphia and found three websites from nature enthusiasts with photos that look very similar to this spiny brown fellow. Unfortunately they did not identify the species. I also saw it in a Nat Geo video, but they did not identify the species either! It is hard to safely do an image search for this thing.

I'm not sure if it is a clam or cockle or something else. I imagine this is pretty rare to be that big and happy in the aquarium. Do you know where the live rock came form (i.e. Florida, indo-pac, etc.)?
 
foster and smith's probably 10 years ago or better. Not sure where it came from. It came in one of those 50 lb. boxes of live rock that they sold at if I remember right the first frag swap they had back in ..... 05 or 06? I want to say Fiji premium or something to that effect if I remember right though.

The rock has been in 3 different tanks since I bought it. It is about to be a 4th tank.

The closest thing I can just straight up guess it is would be a thorny oyster maybe with a super huge mantle. It seems like the mantle is like 3 times the size of what I can see of the shell or more.
 
Mantle gets me too! It's huge in the video/pic. Whatever it is, I'd say you are extremely lucky and it is a very cool thing.
 
It may be a big Ark Clam, but I've never seen one show tentacles like that (or whatever those things are...maybe I have been looking at it wrong and those are just gills). The one in the link above looks to be Barbatia fusca, rather than B. amygdalumtostum. It only grows to about two inches in length, with the average ones I've found probably being closer to one inch. The real B. amygdalumtostum grows larger, to around three inches, but looks fairly different from the one you linked. There are some other species in the family that grow as large as you describe, though.
 
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