Wooster Geologists

Mark Wilson April 14th, 2013

Sure, I could have picked a pristine shell from our collection, but I like the rugged character of this one. It is the terebratulid brachiopod Coenothyris oweni Feldman, 2002, from the lower Saharonim Formation (Middle Triassic) of Har Devanim, southern Israel. I picked it up, along with a dozen others, during our 2010 Israel expedition.

Above we have a dorsal view of this brachiopod. The posterior is at the top, anterior at the bottom. The round hole is the pedicle opening in the ventral valve. (The pedicle is a fleshy stalk the brachiopod uses to attach to a substrate.) As with all brachiopods, you can see the bilateral symmetry of the shell with the plane perpendicular to the hinge between the valves. Terebratulids are still around.

The layered units at the top of this ridge of Har Devanim are the lower part of the Saharonim Formation (Anisian, Middle Triassic). Micah Risacher (’11) is just visible.

Coenothyris oweni was named in 2002 by my friend Howie Feldman. He also wrote a 2005 paper on the paleoecology of this species in the Saharonim Formation of southern Israel. The brachiopods are sometimes found in obrution deposits, meaning they were buried alive by storm-driven sediments (see above).

The genus Coenothyris was named by Joseph Henri Ferdinand Douvillé in 1879 (above as a young man and older). He was a French paleontologist and geologist who worked first as a mining engineer and then a professor of paleontology at the École des Mines (School of Mines). His research took him around the world, but his most prominent papers were on French fossils and geology. In 1881 he became president of the Société géologique de France; in 1907 he was elevated to the Académie des Sciences.

References:

Feldman, H.R. 2002. A new species of Coenothyris (Brachiopoda) from the Triassic (Upper Anisian-Ladinian) of Israel. Journal of Paleontology 76: 34-42.

Feldman, H.R. 2005. Paleoecology, taphonomy, and biogeography of a Coenothyris community (Brachiopoda, Terebratulida) from the Triassic (Upper Anisian-Lower Ladinian) of Israel. American Museum Novitates, no. 3479: 1-19.

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Mark Wilson February 10th, 2013

What you see above is a bit of oyster shell with some curious small gouges in it. The oyster is Ilymatogyra (Afrogyra) africana (Lamarck, 1801) from the En Yorqe’am Formation (Cenomanian) exposed in Hamakhtesh Hagadol, southern Israel. The deep scratches are the trace fossil Gnathichnus pentax Bromley, 1975. As you can just make out in the lower center of the image, the grooves are overlapping series of five-pointed stars. That’s what makes this trace so cool — the stars were made by the unique feeding apparatus of a regular echinoid (sea urchin).
This is the business end of the modern sea urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus (a preserved specimen in Wooster’s collection). You see here in the center the peristome, which is a circle of plates surrounding the mouth, with the sharp five-sided teeth protruding from the echinoid’s Aristotle’s Lantern. These animals slowly graze across hard substrates, using their teeth to scrape the surfaces for algae, fungi and adherent organisms like diatoms. The biting actions of the Aristotle’s Lantern produce the star-shaped incisions we know as the trace fossil Gnathichnus pentax.

I briefly sampled and studied an exposure of the fossiliferous En Yorqe’am Formation in 2003 during my first visit to Israel. The oyster shells in this unit provide one of the few examples of hard substrate communities in the tropics of the Late Cretaceous. The encrusters include ostreid and spondylid bivalves, the cyclostome bryozoan Stomatopora, and the agglutinating foraminiferan Acruliammina. Borings include those of barnacles (Rogerella elliptica) and sponges (Entobia aff. E. megastoma). There is also a sea urchin present (Heterodiadema lybicum) that was almost certainly the maker of the Gnathichnus pentax traces.

References:

Bromley, R.G. 1975. Comparative analysis of fossil and recent echinoid bioerosion. Palaeontology 18: 725-739.

Wilson, M.A. 2003. Paleoecology of a tropical Late Cretaceous (Cenomanian) skeletozoan community in the Negev Desert of southern Israel. Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs 35(6): 420.

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Mark Wilson December 30th, 2012

Last week I had a delightful research afternoon with my former student Lisa Park Boush, now a professor in the Department of Geology and Environmental Science at The University of Akron, and currently Program Director, National Science Foundation, Sedimentary Geology and Paleontology Program, EAR Division. Lisa also directs an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM) lab in Akron. We worked there with the FEI Quanta 200 microscope looking at encrusters on echinoid fragments from the Matmor Formation (Middle Jurassic) of southern Israel. These encrusters are called episkeletozoans, a five-nickel word meaning that they are animals that encrusted the exteriors of skeletal fragments.

The specimen above is an eroded bryozoan episkeletozoan on the interior of an echinoid coronal fragment. It’s been beat up a bit and partially recrystallized, but we can see enough to identify it as the cyclostome Stomatopora Bronn, 1825.
This is the base of an echinoid spine with a tiny foraminiferan attached to it.
Here is a close-up of the above foraminiferan. It is probably Placopsilina d’Orbigny, 1850. You can see an apparent aperture looking a bit like a blowhole on the left end top.
Above is our hero Lisa running the ESEM. This complicated device uses low vacuum so that we can look at uncoated specimens. We just stuck the specimens onto stubs with conducting tape and placed them in the chamber (on the right). I remember the old days when electron microscopy specimens had to be carefully dried and sputter-coated with gold or carbon. The advent of the ESEM made high quality imaging much easier, and thus more commonly done.

The images we took on this day are part of a larger project describing and interpreting the paleoecology of the Matmor Formation. It is a huge task, but every helpful session like this moves us closer to completion. Thanks, Lisa!

References:

Guilbault, J.-P., Krautter, M., Conway, K.W., and Barrie, J.V. 2006. Modern Foraminifera attached to hexactinellid sponge meshwork on the West Canadian Shelf: Comparison with Jurassic counterparts from Europe. Palaeontologia Electronica 9, Issue 1; 3A:48p; http://palaeo-electronica.org/paleo/2006_1/sponge/issue1_06.htm

Richardson-White, S. and S.E. Walker, S.E. 2011. Diversity, taphonomy and behavior of encrusting Foraminifera on experimental shells deployed along a shelf-to-slope bathymetric gradient, Lee Stocking Island, Bahamas. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 312: 305–324.

Taylor, P.D. and Furness, R.W. 1978. Astogenetic and environmental variation of zooid size within colonies of Jurassic Stomatopora (Bryozoa, Cyclostomata). Journal of Paleontology 52: 1093-1102.

Taylor, P.D. and Wilson, M.A. 2003. Palaeoecology and evolution of marine hard substrate communities. Earth-Science Reviews 62: 1-103.

Walker, S.E., Parsons-Hubbard, K., Richardson-White, S., Brett, C. and Powell, E. 2011. Alpha and beta diversity of encrusting foraminifera that recruit to long-term experiments along a carbonate platform-to-slope gradient: Paleoecological and paleoenvironmental implications. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 312: 325–349.

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Mark Wilson December 2nd, 2012

This week’s set of exquisite fossils is presented in honor of Andrew Retzler (’11) who has just had his Senior Independent Study thesis at Wooster published in the journal Cretaceous Research: “Chondrichthyans from the Menuha Formation (Late Cretaceous: Santonian–Early Campanian) of the Makhtesh Ramon region, southern Israel“. The above beauties are a mix of Scapanorhynchus teeth found in the southwestern portion of Makhtesh Ramon during Andrew’s study in the summer of 2010. We were ably assisted by Micah Risacher and Yoav Avni with these collections.

Andrew identified at least eight shark species and two other fish species in the Menuha Formation around Makhtesh Ramon. Most of the teeth are from a soft yellowish chalk with relatively few other fossils (mostly oysters, echinoids, foraminiferans and traces). They show that the Menuha was deposited in a shallow, open-shelf environment on the flanks of the developing Ramon anticline. So, they not only provide new information about Cretaceous sharks in the Middle East, they help sort out a complex stratigraphic-structural problem.

Well done, Andrew! (Andrew is currently a graduate student at Idaho State University. He is working on the Late Devonian Alamo Impact Event in Nevada with Dr. Leif Tapanila.)

Tooth of the shark Cretalamna appendiculata. Composite photo by Andrew Retzler.

Scapanorhynchus rapax, another shark species. Composite photo by Andrew Retzler.

An elegant Scapanorhynchus texana tooth.

Looking south at one of the productive exposures of the Menuha Formation (shown as the red dot) at Makhtesh Ramon. This is one of those amazing Google Earth images.

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Mark Wilson November 11th, 2012

About a year ago I showed my good friend Bill Ausich (The Ohio State University) hundreds of crinoid pieces from the Matmor Formation (Jurassic, Callovian) exposed in Hamakhtesh Hagadol, southern Israel. We knew the crinoid represented by all these pieces belonged to the genus Apiocrinites Miller, 1821, but we could not place the species. Bill, crinoid genius that he is, then figured out this was a new species. We now have the pleasure of introducing Apiocrinites negevensis Ausich & Wilson, 2012.

This species of Apiocrinites, the first described from Jurassic tropical latitudes, is distinguished by features in its calyx (or crown or head). A. negevensis has a narrow radial facet and adjacent arms are not in lateral contact. It also has large aboral cup plates. (And it is gorgeous.) In the above image from Figure 1 of our paper, the A. negevensis holotype is shown as 1-3; 1 is a lateral view, radial plate missing from either side of the single preserved radial plate; 2, radial facet; 3, inside of cup with cavity extending to proximale; 4, a partial cup with proximale, one complete and one broken basal plates, and one broken radial plate (note numerous barnacle borings, Rogerella Saint-Seine, 1951, on this specimen).

A holdfast of Apiocrinites negevensis that was attached to the underside of a coral. (From Figure 1 of Ausich and Wilson, 2012.)

Apiocrinites negevensis parts in the  field (Matmor Formation, Hamakhtesh Hagadol, southern Israel). See this post for a discussion of our fieldwork.

The taxonomic category we know as the Crinoidea was established in 1821 by J.S. Miller, who separated the stalked echinoderms from all the others. At the same time he erected the genus Apiocrinites.

Cover of Miller’s 1821 book describing the crinoids, including the new Apiocrinites.

Miller’s (1821) illustrations of Apiocrinites.

References:

Ausich, W.I. and Wilson, M.A. 2012. New Tethyan Apiocrinitidae (Crinoidea; Articulata) from the Jurassic of Israel. Journal of Paleontology 86: 1051-1055.

Feldman, H.R. and Brett, C.E. 1998. Epi- and endobiontic organisms on Late Jurassic crinoid columns from the Negev Desert, Israel: Implications for co-evolution. Lethaia 31: 57-71.

Miller, J.S. 1821. A natural history of the Crinoidea or lily-shaped animals, with observation on the genera Asterias, Euryale, Comatula, and Marsupites. Bryan & Co, Bristol, 150 pp.

Wilson, M.A., Feldman, H.R. and Krivicich, E.B. 2010. Bioerosion in an equatorial Middle Jurassic coral-sponge reef community (Callovian, Matmor Formation, southern Israel). Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 289: 93-101.

Wilson, M.A., Feldman, H.R., Bowen, J.C. and Avni, J. 2008. A new equatorial, very shallow marine sclerozoan fauna from the Middle Jurassic (late Callovian) of southern Israel. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 263: 24-29.

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Mark Wilson November 7th, 2012

CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA–The last day of a scientific meeting is always less frantic. About half the attendees have left for home, the exhibitors start to give away merchandise so they don’t have to ship it home, and the speakers are a bit more relaxed. Meagen Pollock and I had talks on this final day of the Geological Society of America annual meeting. It felt good to finally give them to audiences made up in large part by our friends and students. I am simply presenting here a few of my slides, including the title image above. The story you may have read in bits and pieces in the Israel entries at this blog. Here is our abstract.

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Mark Wilson November 5th, 2012

CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA–Matt Peppers (’13), a member of the intrepid Team Utah, presented his poster today at the 2012 Geological Society of America annual meeting. Matt is working on the dynamics of the volcanic flows in the Black Rock Desert. Here is his abstract.

Melissa Torma (’13) showed her poster in the same session. She worked in the Negev of southern Israel on the Middle Jurassic Matmor Formation fauna. Her GSA abstract is here.

The third Wooster presenter was Richa Ekka (’13), who worked on Saaremaa Island in Estonia this summer. Her abstract describing her project with a Silurian shallow water dolomitic sequence is here.

Once again it was a joy to watch our students interact with the many geologists who discussed their posters and projects. I now can’t imagine coming to these meetings without an enthusiastic group of our students.

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Mark Wilson September 2nd, 2012

Our fossils this week come from our growing collection of material found in the Matmor Formation (Callovian-Oxfordian) of Makhtesh Gadol, southern Israel. In November I will be giving a talk at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Charlotte, North Carolina, on the taphonomy of Matmor regular echinoids (“sea urchins”). The abstract is online. Taphonomy is the study of the fossilization process. In this case it is essentially what happened to the echinoid remains after death and before final burial. This part of the fossilization history can tell us much about the environment of deposition of the Matmor Formation. The image above is one of the rare complete tests (skeletons) in our study. It is probably a rhabdocidarid echinoid, but the preservation is not quite good enough to tell.

Echinoids are especially interesting for this kind of work. (That link will send you to a wonderful site explaining all you’ll want to know about echinoids and their evolutionary history.) They originated way back in the Ordovician Period, about 450 million years ago, and have retained the same general skeletal structure since then. Their response to physical and chemical conditions on the ocean floor has thus been consistent over time, and we can experiment with modern representatives to estimate their decay and disarticulation processes.

Typical test plate fragments from a rhabdocidarid echinoid in the Matmor Formation. The specimen on the right is encrusted by a very thin plicatulid bivalve, which is in turn encrusted by small branching stomatoporid bryozoans.

A flattened and thorny rhabdocidarid spine. The left end has a socket that attached to a tubercle (bump) on the test of the echinoid.

This cool spine was apparently bitten by a Jurassic fish! Wish I had at least one of that fish’s teeth.

The strange swollen sphere with little holes at the base of this echinoid is a cyst that likely formed from a copepod parasitic infection. Neat (and so far undescribed in the literature).

We can conclude that the Matmor Formation was deposited in very shallow, warm marine waters, probably lagoonal (a favorite living place for rhabdocidarid echinoids), that were only occasionally disturbed by storms and “burial events”. The echinoids decayed and disarticulated on the seafloor (a process that takes about a week) and the pieces tossed around for awhile gathering sclerobionts (encrusters, in this case) and experiencing significant abrasion. This matches other evidence from our previous paleontological studies of the Matmor’s depositional environment.

References:

Donovan, S.K., and Gordon, C.M., 1993, Echinoid taphonomy and the fossil record: Supporting evidence from the Plio-Pleistocene of the Caribbean. Palaios, v. 8, p. 304-306.

Greenstein, B.J., 1991, An integrated study of echinoid taphonomy: Predictions for the fossil record of four echinoid families: Palaios, v. 6, p. 519-540.

Greenstein, B.J., 1992, Taphonomic bias and the evolutionary history of the Family Cidaridae (Echinodermata: Echinoidea): Paleobiology, v. 18, p. 50-79.

Greenstein, B.J., 1993, Is the fossil record of the regular echinoid really so poor? A comparison of Recent and subfossil assemblages: Palaios, v. 8, p. 587-601.

Kidwell, S.M. and Baumiller, T., 1990, Experimental disintegration of regular echinoids: Roles of temperature, oxygen and decay thresholds: Paleobiology, v. 16, p. 247-271.

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Mark Wilson August 6th, 2012

Editor’s note: The Wooster Geologists in Israel this spring wrote abstracts for the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, this November. The following is from student guest blogger Melissa Torma in the format required for GSA abstracts:

TORMA, Melissa, WILSON, Mark A., Department of Geology, The College of Wooster, Wooster, OH 44691 USA; FELDMAN, Howard R., Division of Paleontology (Invertebrates), American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY 10024

The Matmor Formation is a Middle-Upper Jurassic (Callovian-Oxfordian) marl and limestone unit entirely exposed in Hamakhtesh Hagadol in the Negev of southern Israel. It was deposited in shallow marine waters very close to the paleoequator in the Ethiopian Province of the Tethyan Faunal Realm. It is very fossiliferous throughout most of its 100 meters of thickness. The Matmor Formation has been well described stratigraphically, and several of its fossil groups have been taxonomically assessed (notably the brachiopods, ammonites, crinoids and sclerobionts), but there is yet no community-level analysis of the entire fauna. This work is part of that larger paleoecological project. We systematically collected from the most fossiliferous unit of the Matmor (SU 51 in the local stratigraphy; upper Callovian; Quenstedtoceras (Lamberticeras) lamberti Zone) over several kilometers. The community in this marl is dominated by abundant crinoids (a new species of Apiocrinites), rhynchonellid (Somalirhynchia and Burmirhynchia) and terebratulid (Bihenithyris and Digonella) brachiopods, echinoids (mostly rhabdocidarids), calcisponges and scleractinian corals. Mollusks, other than small attached oysters, are relatively rare, and bryozoans are represented by only a few encrusters. The fossils are concentrated in patches a few tens of meters in diameter separated from each other by featureless, unfossiliferous yellow marl. The patches share many of the same common taxa (especially the crinoids and brachiopods) but differ in the relative abundance of corals. No infauna has been found in this unit, either as trace or body fossils. The environment appears to have been a shallow water embayment with a muddy substrate. Patches of epifauna developed as shelly islands across this seafloor. Crinoids and small corals may have been the pioneers on this soft bottom, providing increasing amounts of skeletal debris to facilitate the settlement of brachiopods and other invertebrates. A periodic influx of fine sediment during storms limited the diversity of this assemblage by smothering patches under several centimeters of mud. This community was thus kept in its early successional stages by periodic disturbance.

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Mark Wilson 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.

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