Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, several students and I did fieldwork in the Middle Ordovician Kanosh Formation in west-central Utah. One year we were joined by my friend Tim Palmer of the University of Aberystwyth. Together, Chris Finton (’91), Lewis Kaufman (’91), Tim and I put together a paper describing the carbonate hardground communities in this remarkable formation (Wilson et al., 1992). At top is an image of one of the surface of one of these hardgrounds. It is covered with holdfasts of rhipidocystid eocrinoids, a kind of primitive echinoderm.
Most of the hardgrounds we studied in the Kanosh Formation were found here at Fossil Mountain near Ibex, Utah. (If you want to consider Ibex a place, at least.) It was a beautiful place to work, and it is still highly productive for geologists and paleontologists (see Marenco et al., 2013, for the latest investigation).
The encrusters on the Kanosh hardgrounds are dominated by two groups: bryozoans (which we’ll highlight next week) and stemmed echinoderms (this week’s subject). The echinoderms are represented by thousands of these small attachment structures called holdfasts. The stem of the echinoderm was attached here to the hardground. The entire skeleton of the echinoderm, including the hardground, is made of low-magnesium calcite, so they are very well preserved. Surprisingly, the hardground communities in the Kanosh have very few sponges or borings.
The holdfasts come in a few varieties with subtle morphological differences. Here we have one with a tri-radiate center.
Sometimes the holdfasts blended together on the hardground surface, which was probably the result of competition for attachment space. Note the tri-radiate centers.
From a few plates we found, it appears that the rhipidocystid eocrinoid holdfasts are from a creature like Mandalacystis, which is pictured above from Figure 1 of Lewis et al. (1987). We can’t tell for certain without more of the skeleton, but the holdfasts are very similar to what has been described for the genus.
These Middle Ordovician hardgrounds were formed at an interesting time in the chemistry of the oceans and the development of marine invertebrate faunas. More on that next week!
References:
Ernst, A., Taylor, P.D. and Wilson, M.A. 2007. Ordovician bryozoans from the Kanosh Formation (Whiterockian) of Utah, USA. Journal of Paleontology 81: 998-1008.
Lewis, R.D., Sprinkle, J., Bailey, J.B., Moffit, J. and Parsley, R.L. 1987. Mandalacystis, a new rhipidocystid eocrinoid from the Whiterockian Stage (Ordovician) in Oklahoma and Nevada. Journal of Paleontology 61: 1222-1235.
Marenco, P.J., Marenco, K.N., Lubitz, R.L. and Niu, D. 2013. Contrasting long-term global and short-term local redox proxies during the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event: A case study from Fossil Mountain, Utah, USA. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 377: 45-51.
Wilson, M.A., Palmer, T.J., Guensburg, T.E., Finton, C.D. and Kaufman, L.E. 1992. The development of an Early Ordovician hardground community in response to rapid sea-floor calcite precipitation. Lethaia 25: 19-34.
