Way back in July 2007 we had our first Team Estonia doing geological field research. Andrew Milligan (’08) and I, with our friend Dr. Olev Vinn of the University of Tartu, explored the Upper Ordovician of the northeastern part of the country, perilously close to the Russian border. Most of our work was stratigraphic and related to echinoderms, but I picked up several of these beautiful spherical bryozoans. This specimen comes from the Kiviõli Member, Viivikonna Formation, Kukruse Stage, Upper Ordovician, of Kohtla-Nõmme Quarry (N 59.35665º E 27.22343º). You won’t find the quarry on a map, though, because it was soon afterwards erased by continual mining. Now it is a grassy field. Since we are studying bryozoans this week in my Invertebrate Paleontology course, I’m bringing these specimens to the blog.
This is what two specimens of this bryozoan look like before cutting. They have the size and shape of golf balls.
Here are the same two specimens cut in half and polished to show the growth rings and tubular zooecia (which held the feeding zooids of the living bryozoan).
In this closer view you can see the polygonal outlines of the zooecia, now filled with calcite. In the lower right is a boring that cut through the skeleton soon after the bryozoan’s death on the Ordovician seafloor. It has a bit of sediment that filled the boring except for the very center, which apparently held the body of the borer.
This bryozoan is the trepostome Esthoniopora subsphaerica (Bassler, 1911). Bassler originally called it Hemiphragma subsphaericum, which is a nod to its abundant hemiphragms (curving partitions in the zooecial tubes). As bryozoans go, this one has a fairly simple structure with no exozone, endozone, monticules or spines. How it lived on the seafloor with such a spherical shape is a bit of a mystery. A slightly flattened patch is probably where the sphere contacted the sediment. The borings in these bryozoans were studied by Wyse Jackson and Key (2007).
The species author, Raymond S. Bassler (1878-1961), was an American paleontologist prominent in the study of bryozoans and other encrusting organisms. He was born in Philadelphia and became very interested in fossils from childhood. He received his bachelor’s degree from that paleontological bastion the University of Cincinnati in 1902, followed quickly by his master’s (1903) and PhD (1905) degrees from George Washington University, where he served as a professor for over forty years. He also began work at the United States National Museum in Washington in 1910, rising through the ranks to become Head Curator in 1929. His main interests were bryozoans from the Cenozoic of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, on which he had long collaborations with the French bryozoologist Ferdinand Canu. He also worked closely with Charles Schuchert, Carl Ludwig Rominger, and Edward Oscar Ulrich. Ray Bassler died in 1961.
References:
Bassler, R.S. 1911. The Early Paleozoic Bryozoa of the Baltic Provinces. Bulletin of the US National Museum 77: 1-382.
Koromyslova, A.V., Fedorov, P.V. and Ershova, V.B. 2009. New records of bryozoans from the Lower Ordovician of the Leningrad Region and intercolonial variability in Esthoniopora lessnikowae (Modzalevskaya). Paleontological Journal 43:39–45.
Wyse Jackson, P.N. and Key, M.M. 2007. Borings in trepostome bryozoans from the Ordovician of Estonia: two ichnogenera produced by a single maker, a case of host morphology control. Lethaia 40: 237-252.
