Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: a bifoliate bryozoan (Upper Ordovician of Indiana, USA)

August 12th, 2012

The specimen above is a species within the trepostome bryozoan genus Peronopora Nicholson, 1881. I don’t know which species because that would require me to slice it open and examine its microscopic skeletal details. (A reason why trepostome bryozoans are not especially popular among fossil collectors!) I found it on a recent field trip to the Whitewater Formation (Upper Ordovician, about 450 million years old) in eastern Indiana for Kit Price’s Independent Study project. Below is a photograph of the outcrop taken by Katherine Marenco (’03) — the most dramatic perspective I’ve seen for that simple roadcut!
Peronopora is bifoliate, meaning that it grew erect and budded on two sides from a central plane. Its skeleton was made of thick calcite, so it was resistant on the Ordovician seafloor during life and after death. As you can see in the close-up image below, the surface of this bryozoan is complex. It had other thin bryozoans growing on it (mainly Cuffeyella), and it was bored by worm-like organisms before and after death.

The genus Peronopora is one of the best studied trepostome bryozoans because of its thick, well preserved skeleton and abundance from the Middle through the Upper Ordovician. (Our specimen is in the Richmondian Stage and so is one of the last of its kind.) Paleontologists listed below in the references have examined in detail the colony growth (astogeny), paleoenvironments, biogeography and stratigraphic occurrences of Peronopora, making it a model for the order. My colleague Tim Palmer and I collected the genus to find beautiful examples of the bioclaustration Catellocaula vallata.

Peronopora was described in 1881 by Henry Alleyne Nicholson (1844-1899), an English paleontologist we’ve seen previously in this blog. The genus has a complicated early taxonomic history, having at one point been considered a kind of sponge.

References:

Anstey, R.L. and Pachut, J.F. 2004. Cladistic and phenetic recognition of species in the Ordovician bryozoan genus Peronopora. Journal of Paleontology 78: 651-674.

Boardman, R.S. and Utgaard, J. 1966. A revision of the Ordovician bryozoan genera Monticulipora, Peronopora, Heterotrypa, and Dekayia. Journal of Paleontology 40: 1082-1108.

Hickey, D.R. 1988. Bryozoan astogeny and evolutionary novelties: Their role in the origin and systematics of the Ordovician monticuliporid trepostome genus Peronopora. Journal of Paleontology 62: 180-203.

Nicholson, H.A. 1881. On the structure and affinities of the genus Monticulipora and its subgenera. William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh, 235 p.

Pachut, J.F. and Anstey, R.L. 2009. Inferring evolutionary modes in a fossil lineage (Bryozoa: Peronopora) from the Middle and Late Ordovician. Paleobiology 35: 209-230.

Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: a beautiful phacopid trilobite (Middle Devonian of Ohio, USA)

August 5th, 2012

Trilobites are always favorite fossils, especially big bug-eyed ones like Phacops rana (Green, 1832) shown above. It is, in fact, the state fossil of Pennsylvania after a petition from schoolchildren in 1988. This specimen is from the Middle Devonian of northwestern Ohio. Trilobites were Paleozoic arthropods with a hard dorsal skeleton divided into numerous segments. They look rather cute and brainy because of a swelling between the eyes (the glabella), but that space prosaically contained the stomach. Many trilobites, like this one, could roll up into balls when stressed, much like pill bugs today.

Phacops was studied by paleontologist Niles Eldredge in the early 1970s as the start of what became the theory of punctuated equilibria. The arrangement of lenses in the eyes show rapid changes in short intervals of geological time, which provided evidence for the theory he presented with colleague Stephen Jay Gould.

Phacops rana was named by Jacob Green in 1832. He called it Calymene bufo rana. Hall (1861) renamed it Phacops rana, which was confirmed by Eldedge (1972). Struve (1990) placed it in the new genus Eldredgeops (named after you know who), but I prefer the older name.
Jacob Green (1790-1841) was one of those early 19th Century American polymaths. He was a lawyer, a chemist, a physician, an astronomer, and a paleontologist. He came from a religious family, with both his father and grandfather being theologians. His father, in fact, was at one time president of Princeton University. Jacob graduated from the University of Pennsylvania at the young age of 16, and he published a treatise on electricity when he was 19. He did lawyering for a few years before becoming a professor at (you guessed it) Princeton (and later Jefferson Medical College). He published an amazing array of diverse scientific papers in his career. A trip to England introduced him to trilobites. He then spent a decade putting together a monograph on the trilobites of North America — the first ever.

References:

Eldredge, N. 1972. Systematics and evolution of Phacops rana (Green, 1832) and Phacops iowensis Delo, 1935 (Trilobita) for the Middle Devonian of North America. Bull. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist. 147:45-114.

Eldredge, N. 1973. Systematics of Lower and Lower Middle Devonian species of the trilobite Phacops Emmrich in North America. Bull. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist. 151:285-338.

Green, J. 1832. A Monograph of the Trilobites of North America. Philadelphia.

Hall, J. 1861. Descriptions of new species of fossils from the Upper Helderberg, Hamilton, and Chemung Groups. N.Y. State Cab. Nat. Hist., Ann. Rept. No. 14.

Struve, W. 1990. Paläozoologie III (1986-1990). Courier Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg 127: 251-279.

Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: an encrusted plesiosaur vertebra (Jurassic of England)

July 29th, 2012

The weathered bone pictured above sits on my desk as a treasured memento. It is the centrum of a plesiosaur vertebra. I found it in the Faringdon Sponge Gravels (Lower Cretaceous) of Oxfordshire, England, during my first research leave (1985). I was working on a project involving encrusters, borers and nestlers (now called sclerobionts) on and in cobbles in this marine gravel (Wilson, 1986). This bone rolled out of the gravels at my feet during a particularly rainy field day.

But why do I say in the title that this vertebral fragment is Jurassic if it is found in a Cretaceous deposit? Because it is what paleontologists call a remanié fossil, a fossil reworked from an earlier deposit into a later one. During the Early Cretaceous, tidal currents worked on an exposure of Jurassic claystones in what will become southern England, eroding bones and other Jurassic debris and transporting them into a gravel-filled channel.

This gravel consisted of bones, shells, quartzite pebbles and claystone cobbles. It was tossed around under marine conditions, with many of their surfaces encrusted and bored by invertebrates. If you look closely at the end-on view above, you can see some lighter-colored patches that represent little calcareous sponges. When I collected this bone these sponges were the important parts. Now I’m impressed more by the fact that it is a bit of plesiosaur.

Plesiosaurs (the name means “near-lizard”) were magnificent marine reptiles of the Jurassic and Cretaceous. They were extraordinary predators on a variety of animals, and despite their bulk were highly maneuverable because of their four large paddle-like appendages. My little bone is too weathered to place in the complex plesiosaur skeleton, other than to say it is probably from the back rather than the neck or tail. Rather than me wax poetic on the Plesiosauria, you might want to visit Plesiosaur.com.

The first plesiosaur (Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus) was found by one of the most famous paleontologists of the 19th Century: Mary Anning (1799-1847). Anning was a spectacularly successful fossil collector along the “Jurassic Coast” of southern England. She had a tough life, selling fossils to support her family. She discovered many Jurassic fossils, from ammonites to ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. The paleontological establishment at the time often bought fossils from her, but they didn’t always give her credit for her work.

Little known fact: Mary Anning was the inspiration for the classic tongue-twister, “She sells seashells on the seashore. The shells she sells are seashells, I’m sure. So if she sells seashells on the seashore, then I’m sure she sells seashore shells.” I’m sure she’s proud!

To Mary Anning and her magnificent plesiosaur!

References:

Conybeare, W.D. 1824. On the discovery of an almost perfect skeleton of the Plesiosaurus. Transactions of the Geological Society of London, Second series; 1 p. 381-389.

Goodhue, T.W. 2002. Curious Bones: Mary Anning and the Birth of Paleontology (Great Scientists). Morgan Reynolds.

Wilson, M.A. 1986. Coelobites and spatial refuges in a Lower Cretaceous cobble-dwelling hardground fauna. Palaeontology 29: 691-703.

Wooster’s Fossils of the Week: A stromatoporoid-stromatolite combination (Upper Silurian of Saaremaa Island, Silurian)

July 22nd, 2012

There are two common fossil types that begin with “strom” and look roughly alike to the untrained eye. One is the stromatoporoid, which is a calcareous sponge, and the other is the stromatolite, which is a layered structure produced by photosynthetic bacteria. I hadn’t seen them together until our expedition to the Silurian of Estonia last summer. Wooster senior Nick Fedorchuk (’12) collected the specimen above at his outcrop of limestones and dolomites just above the Wenlock/Ludlow Boundary along Soeginina Cliff, Saaremaa. (In the rock sequence Richa Ekka is now studying.) We thought it was simply a stromatolite until he cut it to show that the base was a stromatoporoid.
“Stroma” is Greek for a bed or layer. Both stromatolites and stromatoporoids have horizontally laminated structures. The “lite” in stromatolite means rock, so a stromatolite is literally a “layered rock”. They are accretionary structures made by mostly cyanobacteria that collect and bind fine sediment into thin layers, usually in very shallow waters. Often the bacteria make their own calcareous cement for these laminae as a byproduct of photosynthesis. They’ve been doing this for a long time: the earliest known fossils are 3.5 billion-year-old stromatolites.

Stromatoporoids are very different. The “poroid” refers to their semi-porous skeletal layers, which are separated from each other by minuscule pillars. Their peak of abundance was in the Silurian and Devonian Periods, but they survived all the way up into the Cretaceous. They made significant reefs in the Paleozoic, often more common than the corals back then. We believe that they were a type of sponge (Phylum Porifera) with a thin layer of soft tissue on the exterior layer filter-feeding in the typical sponge manner.

Stromatolites are more common in sediments formed in very shallow, warm marine waters with elevated salinity; stromatoporoids liked more normal marine conditions. Finding the stromatolite on top of the stromatoporoid here means that either the environment changed between the two (shallowing, likely), or that the stromatoporoid was dislodged from more offshore waters during a storm and washed into a shallow lagoon, becoming a substrate for stromatolitic growth.

Curiously, there was a suggestion in 1990 by Kaźmierczak and Kempe that stromatoporoids ARE stromatolites. They pointed out that precipitation features in modern stromatolites can be very complex, producing features that resemble those of ancient stromatoporoids. This idea gained no traction, though, and most paleontologists are satisfied that these two types of “strom” have very different origins.

References:

Akihiro, K. 1989. Deposition and palaeoecology of an Upper Silurian stromatoporoid reef on southernmost Gotland, Sweden. Geological Journal 24: 295-315.

Kaźmierczak, J. and Kempe, S. 1990. Modern cyanobacterial analogs of Paleozoic stromatoporoids. Science 250, no. 4985, pp. 1244-1248.

Lebold, J.G. 2000. Quantitative analysis of epizoans on Silurian stromatoporoids within the Brassfield Formation. Journal of Paleontology 74: 394-403.

Segars, M.T. and Liddell, W.D. 1988. Microhabitat analyses of Silurian stromatoporoids as substrata for epibionts. Palaios 3: 391-403.

Soja, C.M., White, B., Antoshkina, A., Joyce, S., Mayhew, L., Flynn, B. and Gleason, A. 2000. Development and decline of a Silurian stromatolite reef complex, Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska. Palaios 15: 273-292.

Vinn, O. and Wilson, M.A. 2010. Endosymbiotic Cornulites in the Sheinwoodian (Early Silurian) stromatoporoids of Saaremaa, Estonia. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie, Abh., v. 257: p. 13–22.

Wooster’s Fossils of the Week: ribbed brachiopods (Middle Jurassic of Israel)

July 15th, 2012

These delightful brachiopods are from the Matmor Formation (Jurassic, Callovian) of the Negev in southern Israel. They are part of a long-term Wooster project describing and interpreting a diverse paleocommunity. The latest trip to study these fossils was this past March with Melissa Torma and our Israeli colleague Yoav Avni. The shells above are Burmirhynchia jirbaenesis Muir-Wood 1935. We identified them using the excellent work on Matmor brachiopods by Feldman et al. (2001).

The location in Makhtesh Gadol, Negev, Israel, where these specimens were collected.

Burmirhynchia jirbaensis was originally named from a collection of specimens found in the Biheh Limestone of the Jirba Range in British Somaliland (modern-day Somalia). This is a wonderful place for Jurassic paleontology, but not one I’m likely to visit soon!

Burmirhynchia is an important brachiopod in the Jurassic of the Tethyan Realm. It has been found throughout the Middle East, southern Europe, Africa and Australia. It has, apparently, been overly “split” into over 90 species, most of which are dubious at best (Shi and Grant, 1993). B. jirbaensis, though, is a legitimate species based on internal characteristics you can only see by sectioning or internal tomography (Feldman et al., 2001).

The genus Burmirhynchia was described in 1918 by an interesting character: Sydney Savory Buckman (1860-1929). Buckman is best known for his work on ammonites, but he was also a novelist, social reformer and (gasp) a fossil dealer (to support his geological work). He was born in Cirencester, England, but grew up in Dorset among some of the most spectacular Jurassic geology in the world. Buckman was briefly a farmer, but he most enjoyed amateur geology and working on collections in local museums. Ammonites were his passion — he worked on several large monographs describing hundreds of new species. (The complaints about his taxonomic splitting began then.) His most eccentric idea was that ammonites may have suffered from a kind of flatulence produced by “nervous apprehension of danger”, with the resulting gas increasing their buoyancy and helping them flee to safety. I don’t recall hearing that one in school!

Curiously enough, Sydney Savory Buckman made one progressive addition to the vocabulary of paleontology: in 1893 he invented the term “palaeo-biology” (Sepkoski, 2012).

References:

Buckman, S.S. 1918. The Brachiopoda of the Namyau Beds, Northern Shan States, Burma. Memoirs of the Geological Survey of India, Palaeontologia lndica, new series 3: 1-299.

Feldman, H.R., Owen, E.F. and Hirsch, F. 2001. Brachiopods from the Jurassic (Callovian) of Hamakhtesh Hagadol (Kurnub Anticline), southern Israel. Palaeontology 44: 637–658.

Sepkoski, D. 2012. Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline. University Of Chicago Press, Chicago, 440 pages.

Shi, X. and Grant, R.E. 1993. Jurassic rhynchonellids: internal structures and taxonomic revisions. Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology, Number 73, 190 pages.

Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: fusulinids (Upper Carboniferous of Kansas)

July 8th, 2012

They look like little footballs, at least the American variety of football. Fusulinids (the name indicating the fusiform shape) are about the size and shape of wheat grains. They were marine protists (single-celled eucaryotes) that lived from the late Early Carboniferous to the end of the Permian Period. Fusulinids are foraminiferans of the Superfamily Fusulinoidea named by Valerïan Ivanovich Möller (Imperial School of Mines, St. Petersburg) in 1878. They are critical index fossils for the Late Paleozoic, and I knew them intimately during my dissertation work in southern Nevada.

The shell of a fusulinid is very complex. It is made of a granular calcite wrapped along the axis of the football in a series of chambers with internal walls. Each coil wrapped completely over the earlier coils, making the shells involute. They are most commonly studied in section to reveal the internal complexity.
Cross-section of a fusulinid (Triticites) from the Permian of Iowa.

Fusulinid evolution was dramatic for a single-celled group. The earliest varieties were very small (one or two millimeters in length), and the later ones up to five centimenters long. Their internal features also increased in complexity, making each successive new species very easy to identify. This is why they are such good indications of geological time intervals. It is this biostratigraphic value that proved most useful to me as a young graduate student working in what seemed to me to be virtually featureless Carboniferous limestones.

References:

Hageman, S.A., Kaesler, R.L. and Broadhead, T.W. 2004. Fusulinid taphonomy: encrustation, corrasion, compaction, and dissolution. Palaios 19: 610-617.

Möller, V.I., von. 1878. Die Spiral-gewundenen Foraminiferen des russischen Kohlenkalks. Mémoires de l’académie impériale des sciences de St-Pétersbourg, VII Série, Tome XXV, No. 9 et dernier.

Ross, C.A. 1967. Development of fusulinid (Foraminiferida) faunal realms. Journal of Paleontology 41: 1341-1354.

Stevens, C.H. and Stone, P. 2007. The Pennsylvanian–Early Permian Bird Spring carbonate shelf, southeastern California: Fusulinid biostratigraphy, paleogeographic evolution, and tectonic implications. Geological Society of America Special Paper 429, 82 p.

Wooster’s Fossils of the Week: Wiggly little foraminiferans from the Middle Jurassic of southern England

July 1st, 2012

These shell fragments are of the oyster Praeexogyra hebridica var. elongata, and I picked them up long ago from a remarkable unit made almost entirely of them. It is the Elongata Bed at the base of the Frome Clay (Middle Jurassic) near Langton Herring in Fleet Lagoon, Dorset, England. (See House (1993) for more details, and this site has a nice geological map.) Nearly every oyster piece is covered with elongated, flaky white encrusters easily overlooked. They are attached foraminiferans known as Vinelloidea crussolensis Canu, 1913. (I labelled the specimens with the better-known name “Nubeculinella Cushman, 1930″ when I collected them. Voigt (1973) had earlier shown that this genus is a junior synonym of Vinelloidea. I should have known better.)

Vinelloidea is in the Order Miliolida of the Foraminifera. It is a very common sclerobiont in shallow water Jurassic and Cretaceous deposits, especially in western Europe. Curiously, I’ve not yet seen it in the Jurassic or Cretaceous of Israel, and I’ve looked very hard at the encrusting faunas there. Vinelloidea grew as a series of glassy chambers across shells, pebbles and hardgrounds (Reolid and Gaillard, 2007; Zaton et al., 2011). When the conditions were right, as they were in the Middle Jurassic in southern England, it could be one of the most abundant encrusting organisms in life’s history.

References:

Canu, F. 1913. Contribution à l’étude des Bryozoaires fossiles XIII. Bryozoaires jurassiques. Bulletin de la Société géologique de France, série 4, 13:267-276.

Cushman, J.A. 1930. Note sur quelques foraminifères jurassiques d’Auberville (Calvados). Bulletin de la Société linnéenne de Normandie, série 8, vol. 2 (1929): 132-135.

House, M.E. 1993. Geology of the Dorset Coast. Geologists Association Guide No. 22. 2nd edition, 164 pages.

Reolid, M. and Gaillard, C. 2007. Microtaphonomy of bioclasts and paleoecology of microencrusters from Upper Jurassic spongiolithic limestones (External Prebetic, southern Spain). Facies 53: 97-112.

Voigt, E. 1973. Vinelloidea Canu, 1913 (angeblich jurassische Bryozoa Ctenostomata) = Nubeculinella Cushman, 1930 (Foraminifera). Paläontologische Abhandlungen 4: 665-670.

Zaton, M., Machocka, S., Wilson, M.A., Marynowski, L. and Taylor, P.D. 2011. Origin and paleoecology of Middle Jurassic hiatus concretions from Poland. Facies 57: 275-300.

Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A mastodon tusk (Late Pleistocene of Holmes County, Ohio)

June 24th, 2012

This long and weathered tusk sits in a display case outside my office. It is from the American Mastodon (Mammut americanum) and was found many decades ago in Holmes County, just south of Wooster. A tooth found with it was a previous Fossil of the Week. Such tusks are rather rare because the ivory tends to disintegrate faster than tooth and bone. Our specimen is, in fact, hollow and held together by wires.
Above is a closer view of the proximal end of the tusk (the part closest to the face). You can see the hollowness and, curiously, that the ivory is charred. I used to tell students that the mastodon must have been hit by lightning, but I stopped when they took me too seriously!

This gives me a chance to mention a mastodon specimen I recently saw in a visit earlier this month to this famous place:
Monticello is, of course, the home of Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father and the third president of the United States. Jefferson was a science enthusiast, and paleontology was one of his passions. He was fascinated with ancient life, and some have considered him the first American paleontologist. One room of the White House, for example, appears to have been devoted to his fossil bone collection.

Mastodons were particularly interesting to Jefferson because of an odd idea that was in vogue in France at the time. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, a famous French naturalist, wrote that “a niggardly sky and an unprolific land” caused life in the New World to be weak, small and degenerate. Life in North America was considered by the French to be quite inferior to that in Europe. Jefferson knew, of course, this was nuts. Having the bones of a North American elephant, as large or larger than any other elephants, would show the Frenchies how wrong they were. And Buffon eventually agreed, although he died before he could correct his books.
Above is a lower jawbone of Mammut americanum in Monticello. I wish I could have taken my own photograph, but this was not allowed. I’ve had to make do with one of their images online.

Curiously, Jefferson had one serious deficit when it comes to calling him a paleontologist. He apparently did not believe that species ever go extinct. When he dispatched Lewis and Clark on their expedition, for example, he expected them to find living mastodons deep in the American interior. Too bad they didn’t!

References:

Conniff, R. 2010. Mammoths and Mastodons: All American Monsters. Smithsonian Magazine, April 2010.

Semonin, P. 2000. American Monster: How the Nation’s First Prehistoric Creature Became a Symbol of National Identity. New York University Press, New York, 502 pages.

Thomson, K.S. 2008. The Legacy of the Mastodon: the Golden Age of Fossils in America. New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press.

Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: a long and skinny bryozoan (Upper Cretaceous of Wyoming and South Dakota, USA)

June 17th, 2012

Please say hello to Pierrella larsoni Wilson & Taylor 2012 — a new genus and species of ctenostome bryozoan from the Upper Cretaceous (Campanian-Maastrichtian) Pierre Shale of Wyoming and South Dakota. I imagine it as a graceful little thing spreading delicately through the dark interiors of baculitid ammonite conchs on a muddy Cretaceous seafloor. Above is a fossil of Baculites formed when sediment filled the shell and lithified. The shell itself dissolved away, leaving the internal mold  of rock (or steinkern) as a kind of cast of the interior. (But don’t ever call it a “cast”!) Pierrella larsoni encrusted the inside surface of Baculites and is thus preserved as a series of connected teardrops on the outside of the internal mold. The specimen is from Heart Tail Ranch, South Dakota, and the scale bar is 10 mm. (Baculites was described in an earlier Fossil of the Week post.)

My friend Paul Taylor (The Natural History Museum, London) and I had a wonderful field trip to South Dakota and Wyoming in June 2008. We were accompanied by my ace student John Sime (who is a spectacular field paleontologist) and greatly helped by the distinguished paleontologist and ammonite expert Neal Larson (Black Hills Institute of Geological Research), Bill Wahl (Wyoming Dinosaur Center), and Mike Ross, an avid amateur paleontologist in Casper, Wyoming. We also had assistance from Walter Stein (PaleoAdventures) and the enthusiastic and knowledgeable amateur paleontologist Jamie Brezina. You can see some images from our trip here.
The primary purpose of our expedition was to find and study Late Cretaceous bryozoans. Our paper describing this work has now appeared in a special volume on bryozoan research. The specimen above on the left is from Red Bird, Wyoming, and the one on the right is from the Heart Tail Ranch in South Dakota. The scale bars are 10 and 5 mm respectively.
Above is a typical example of the Pierre Shale exposures we worked with on this trip. This particular shot is from the Chance Davis Ranch in South Dakota, but they all looked pretty much the same. We crouched down and scanned miles of “outcrop” like this, picking fossils up from the ground.

Finding ctenostome bryozoans preserved like this is unusual. They did not (and do not today) have calcareous skeletons. These Pierre specimens were somehow preserved as the internal molds formed, most likely through some process of early cementation of the mud. I described this fossil fauna and its preservation in an earlier post from a GSA meeting.

Pierrella is named after the Pierre Shale; larsoni after our colleague Neal Larson. It is nice to have locked into the name direct reminders of that delightful summer under those big Western skies.

Reference:

Wilson, M.A. and Taylor, P.D. 2012. Palaeoecology, preservation and taxonomy of encrusting ctenostome bryozoans inhabiting ammonite body chambers in the Late Cretaceous Pierre Shale of Wyoming and South Dakota, USA. In: Ernst, A., Schäfer, P. and Scholz, J. (eds.) Bryozoan Studies 2010; Lecture Notes in Earth Sciences 143: 399-412.

Wooster’s Fossils of the Week: dinosaur gastroliths (Jurassic of Utah, USA)

June 10th, 2012

These rounded stones are labeled in our collections as gastroliths (literally “stomach stones”) from Starr Springs near Hanksville, Wayne County, Utah. I’m featuring them this week in honor of our Utah Project team working right now in the baking Black Rock Desert near Fillmore, Utah.

From their reported location, these stones are likely out of the Summerville Formation (Middle-Upper Jurassic) and, in another plausible supposition, probably from some sort of dinosaur. Sometimes we just have to trust the labels on our specimens, at least for educational purposes!

My friend Tony Martin recently wrote an excellent blog post on gastroliths, so I won’t repeat his insights here. The general wisdom is that these stones were consumed by herbivorous dinosaurs to aid in their digestion. They would have lodged them in the equivalent of a gizzard and used them to grind their food, much like modern birds. (And yes, dinosaurs were birds themselves.) Gastroliths usually have a resistant lithology to be useful as grinders. The gastroliths above are chert, one of the hardest rock types.

Identifying gastroliths correctly is a bit of a challenge if you don’t find them inside a dinosaur skeleton. The most common indicators are that they are very smooth, are in a location where they were unlikely to have been transported inorganically, and are of a lithology unlike the surrounding rock (“exotics” as geologists like to call them). Still, even with all these criteria met, we must be a tad suspicious if we didn’t find them associated with dinosaur bones. I would never, for example, buy a gastrolith in a rock shop. Without context, it could be just a stream-worn stone. I’m trusting the label on ours that we have the real deal!

References:

Stokes, W.L. 1987. Dinosaur gastroliths revisited. Journal of Paleontology 61: 1242-1246.

Wings, O. 2007. A review of gastrolith function with implications for fossil vertebrates and a revised classification. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 52: 1-16.

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