This week’s contribution from the Wooster collections will be short. If all is going well, as this is posted I’m on my way to the Fourth International Palaeontological Congress in Mendoza, Argentina. I hope to have a few posts from that exotic place!
The fossil above is the crown of a monobathrid crinoid called Xenocrinus baeri (Meek, 1872). It was found by Bianca Hand (Wooster ’14) in the Bull Fork Formation (Upper Ordovician, Richmondian) on an Invertebrate Paleontology field trip to the emergency spillway at Caesar Creek State Park in southern Ohio (seen below). Thank you to my friend Bill Ausich of The Ohio State University for identifying this fossil. It is an unprepared specimen of a common species, and it is not nearly so flashy as in other collections. Still, it is one of the best finds from our class field trips, and it is cool. The calyx is on the right and mostly buried in matrix. Four filter-feeding arms extend to the left. Where the matrix is broken away on the far right you can see tiny ossicles from the pinnules on the arms. Someone using a needle very carefully under a microscope could expose more details of this crinoid, but I like leaving something to the imagination!
References:
Schumacher, G.A. and Ausich, W.I. 198). New Upper Ordovician echinoderm site: Bull Fork Formation, Caesar Creek Reservoir (Warren County, Ohio). The Ohio Journal of Science 83: 60-64.
