Just one image for this week’s fossil, but we make up for the numbers in image length! The above fossil with the alternating “saw teeth” is the scleractinian coral Enallhelia d’Orbigny, 1849. It is a rare component of the diverse coral fauna found in the Matmor Formation (Callovian-Oxfordian) in southern Israel. I collected this particular specimen (from locality C/W-370 in Hamakhtesh Hagadol, for the record) during this past summer’s expedition to the Negev. It is preserved remarkably well considering that its original aragonite skeleton has been completely calcitized.
Enallhelia is in the Family Stylinidae, also named by French naturalist Alcide Charles Victor Marie Dessalines d’Orbigny. (Love that name; he was briefly profiled in a previous entry.) There are many species in the genus (at least two dozen), but I can’t figure out which this one is. I’ll need a coral expert because half of the available species look pretty much the same to me. Enallhelia is a dendroid coral, meaning its corallum has tree-like branches, only one of which we see here. Each branch has alternating corallites on each side, which in life would have held the individual tentacular polyps. Each corallite has radial symmetry, not the usual hexameral symmetry as seen in most scleractinians. The genus ranges from the Jurassic into the Cretaceous and is cosmopolitan. Enallhelia is especially well known from Europe, but that may be just a collector effect.
What I like about Enallhelia is that it can be an excellent paleoenvironmental marker. Leinfelder and Nose (1997) show that it is most often found in “marly coral meadows” near storm wavebase on carbonate platforms. This means it is in shallow but quiet waters well within the photic zone most of the time, but may be occasionally disturbed by storm wave currents. This is an accurate description of most of the depositional environment of the Matmor Formation.
References:
Hudson, R.G.S. 1958. The upper Jurassic faunas of southern Israel. Geological Magazine 95: 415-425.
Leinfelder, R.R. and Nose, M. 1997. Upper Jurassic coral communities within siliciclastic settings (Lusitanian Basin, Portugal): Implications for symbiotic and nutrient strategies. Proceedings of the 8th International Coral Reef Symposium 2: 1755-1760.
Olivier, N., Martin-Garin, B., Colombié, C., Cornée, J.-J., Giraud, F., Schnyder, J., Kabbachi, B. and Ezaidi, K. 2012. Ecological succession evidence in an Upper Jurassic coral reef system (Izwarn section, High Atlas, Morocco). Geobios 45: 555-572.
