Tag Archives: Ordovician

Two new Upper Ordovician bryozoan papers appeared this week

Readers of this blog will remember Kate Runciman, a 2022 graduate of The College of Wooster and now a graduate student at the University of Cambridge. Her Independent Study thesis (after peer review and revisions) has now been published in … Continue reading

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Paleoecology class at Wooster finishes the semester in great style

I was very fortunate this semester to have such a fine class of paleoecologists. This course broadly covers the Earth’s ecological history, so it consists of principles, theories and processes illuminated with case studies, all strung along the thread of … Continue reading

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An Exciting Trip to Tour Unconventional Oil and Gas Wells

This semester’s Geology of Energy Resources course, which focuses on how fossil fuels form, are extracted, and are used, had the opportunity to visit two unconventional oil and gas wells run by Ascent Resources located in southeastern Ohio this week. … Continue reading

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A delightful little field trip in Ohio with a Polish-American team

Today was astonishingly beautiful in Ohio: bright blue skies and the peak of fall leaf colors. By happy circumstance, I had three Polish paleontologist friends visiting Wooster after the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh last week. Greg … Continue reading

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Work continues on our Ordovician paleoecology project

The Fall 2023 Paleoecology class is continuing to work on its Upper Ordovician fossil collections from our field trip at the beginning of the semester. Part of the class is shown above sorting their specimens and identifying them as precisely … Continue reading

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A lovely day to visit the Ordovician seas of Indiana

This year’s Paleoecology class field trip was to a familiar place: a roadcut outside Richmond, Indiana, exposing the Whitewater Formation in the gorgeous Upper Ordovician System. We call it the catchy name “C/W-148” (N 39.78722°, W 84.90166°). It was a … Continue reading

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Another new paper: A nestling brachiopod in an Ordovician boring and its implications

I know, I know, several new papers lately. This spike in publications is a function of two things: The pandemic with its enforced isolation meant my colleagues and I had more time to finish manuscripts, and I belong to some … Continue reading

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The Ordovician Bioclaustration Revolution: A new paper

Bioclaustration is the process by which an organism is embedded within the growing skeleton of another. Bioclaustrations are fascinating in the fossil record because they give direct information about how two or more organisms lived together in the ancient past … Continue reading

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A new paper on brachiopod symbiosis in the Early Paleozoic

My Estonian colleague and friend Olev Vinn and I have been working for many years on examples of parasitism recorded in the fossil record. For the last couple of years we have been summarizing the data and assessing paleoecological and … Continue reading

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A new paper on symbiosis between brachiopods and bryozoans in the Late Ordovician of Estonia

I’m pleased to announce another paper has appeared from our ongoing Estonian-German-American collaboration on symbiosis in the fossil record. The beautiful specimen above is the trepostome bryozoan Esthoniopora subsphaerica growing around a bioclaustration, forming a distinctive tube (Katian, Rakvere, northern … Continue reading

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