The specimen above is a species within the trepostome bryozoan genus Peronopora Nicholson, 1881. I don’t know which species because that would require me to slice it open and examine its microscopic skeletal details. (A reason why trepostome bryozoans are not especially popular among fossil collectors!) I found it on a recent field trip to the Whitewater Formation (Upper Ordovician, about 450 million years old) in eastern Indiana for Kit Price’s Independent Study project. Below is a photograph of the outcrop taken by Katherine Marenco (’03) — the most dramatic perspective I’ve seen for that simple roadcut!
Peronopora is bifoliate, meaning that it grew erect and budded on two sides from a central plane. Its skeleton was made of thick calcite, so it was resistant on the Ordovician seafloor during life and after death. As you can see in the close-up image below, the surface of this bryozoan is complex. It had other thin bryozoans growing on it (mainly Cuffeyella), and it was bored by worm-like organisms before and after death.
The genus Peronopora is one of the best studied trepostome bryozoans because of its thick, well preserved skeleton and abundance from the Middle through the Upper Ordovician. (Our specimen is in the Richmondian Stage and so is one of the last of its kind.) Paleontologists listed below in the references have examined in detail the colony growth (astogeny), paleoenvironments, biogeography and stratigraphic occurrences of Peronopora, making it a model for the order. My colleague Tim Palmer and I collected the genus to find beautiful examples of the bioclaustration Catellocaula vallata.
Peronopora was described in 1881 by Henry Alleyne Nicholson (1844-1899), an English paleontologist we’ve seen previously in this blog. The genus has a complicated early taxonomic history, having at one point been considered a kind of sponge.
References:
Anstey, R.L. and Pachut, J.F. 2004. Cladistic and phenetic recognition of species in the Ordovician bryozoan genus Peronopora. Journal of Paleontology 78: 651-674.
Boardman, R.S. and Utgaard, J. 1966. A revision of the Ordovician bryozoan genera Monticulipora, Peronopora, Heterotrypa, and Dekayia. Journal of Paleontology 40: 1082-1108.
Hickey, D.R. 1988. Bryozoan astogeny and evolutionary novelties: Their role in the origin and systematics of the Ordovician monticuliporid trepostome genus Peronopora. Journal of Paleontology 62: 180-203.
Nicholson, H.A. 1881. On the structure and affinities of the genus Monticulipora and its subgenera. William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh, 235 p.
Pachut, J.F. and Anstey, R.L. 2009. Inferring evolutionary modes in a fossil lineage (Bryozoa: Peronopora) from the Middle and Late Ordovician. Paleobiology 35: 209-230.
Do you know which site that picture is taken at? I want to use it in my presentation but all the sites look the same…Thanks!
Our first site. Whitewater. You know, it is better to ask me by email than a public comment on this blog.