Originally this was going to be a mystery fossil for a crowd-sourced identification while I’m here in Israel doing fieldwork, but through the wonders of the internet I finally found a match for the strange fossil above: it is the scleractinian coral Aspidiscus König, 1825 (Family Latomeandridae). Yoav Avni and I found several specimens in the lower third of the En Yorqe’am Formation (Upper Cretaceous, Cenomanian) in the Negev of southern Israel. I had never seen anything like it before.
The view above is of the upper surface of this discoidal fossil. There are several short and seemingly random ridges, which I learned later are called monticules in this genus. Each monticule has a series of septa, or thin vertical partitions. This was a compound coral, meaning it had multiple polyps on its surface, presumably each sitting on a monticule.
This is a reverse view of the En Yorqe’am variety of Aspidiscus. The pits appear to be molds of a gastropod on which the young coral must have recruited. It then grew centripetally, making a fine series of growth lines across a soft sediment.
This diagram from Pandey et al. (2011) is a diagram of Aspidiscus cristatus found in the Cenomanian of Sinai, not too far from here. (This species is also found in Algeria, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, and Afghanistan — all in the Cenomanian.) Note that the center of A. cristatus has two large crossing monticules and the Israeli specimen does not. This is why I’m keeping it in open nomenclature — it doesn’t appear to be the same species. A. cristatus is found in the middle to early late Cenomanian; the En Yorqe’am specimen seems so far to be only in the early Cenomanian. This may mean the Israeli version is an older species. Both clearly liked living in marly shallow marine sediments.
Here’s the bonus: look at the round holes in the upper surfaces of these two specimens. These are caused by symbionts of some kind that lived within the growing coral. You can see best in the specimen on the right how the coral grew around the symbionts, producing a kind of tube. Nice.
Sorry for the lower quality of images this week. I’m photographing the fossils as best I can with a bedside lamp, a tiny tripod, and a shirt for background.
References:
Avnimelech, M. 1947. A new species of Aspidiscus from the Middle Cretaceous of Sinai and remarks on this genus in general. Eclogae geologicae Helvetiae 40: 294-298.
Gill, G.A. and Lafuste, J.G. 1987. Structure, repartition et signification paleogeographique d’Aspidiscus, hexacoralliaire cenomanien de la Tethys. Bulletin de la Societe Geologique de France 3: 921-934.
