We have here another fossil collected by a Wooster student on the August 2015 College of Wooster Invertebrate Paleontology field trip to Caesar Creek Lake, Ohio. Eduardo Luna picked up this specimen of the tabulate coral Calapoecia huronensis (Billings, 1865) from the Waynesville Formation (Upper Ordovician). For some reason in all my years of working in the Upper Ordovician, I’ve not come across this coral species before. Eduardo had sharp eyes as you can see it is rather small. The circular tubes are corallites, each of which held a coral polyp in life. This particular coral is distinctive for its septal spines along the inside rim of each corallite, giving them a beaded appearance.
This is the underside of Eduardo’s coral. The corallites on the left side are eroded, showing the elongated septal spines that run lengthwise down their inside walls.
We met the author of C. huronensis, Elkanah Billings (1820-1876), earlier this year, but why not show the handsome Canadian again? He originally described this coral species in 1865. He was Canada’s first government paleontologist, and he very much looked the part. Billings was born on a farm near Ottawa. He went to law school and became a lawyer in 1845, but he gave up stodgy law books for the bracing life of a field paleontologist. In 1856, Billings joined the Geological Survey of Canada, eventually naming over a thousand new species in his career. The Billings Medal is given annually by the Geological Association of Canada to the most outstanding of its paleontologists.
References:
Billings, E. 1865. Notice of some new genera and species of Palaeozoic fossils. Canadian Naturalist and Geologist, New Series 2: 432–452.
Browne, R.G. 1965. Some Upper Cincinnatian (Ordovician) colonial corals of north-central Kentucky. Journal of Paleontology 39: 1177-1191.
Cox, I. 1936. Revision of the genus Calapoecia Billings. Bulletin of the National Museum of Canada 80: 1–48.
Jull, R.K. 1976. Review of some species of Favistina, Nyctopora, and Calapoecia (Ordovician corals from North America). Geological Magazine 113: 457-467.
