Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A trilobite (Middle Cambrian of Utah)

Mark Wilson August 14, 2011 1:32 am

I’ve avoided having a trilobite as Fossil of the Week because it seems like such a cliché. Everyone knows trilobites, and they are the most common “favorite fossil” (invertebrate, anyway). Plus our best trilobite (seen above) is the most familiar trilobite of all: Elrathia kingii (Meek, 1870). One professional collector — just one guy — said that in 20 years he sold 1.5 million of these.

Still, trilobites are cool. They virtually define the Paleozoic Era, appearing in the Early Cambrian and leaving the stage (with so many others) in the latest Permian. They were arthropods, sharing this very large phylum with insects, spiders, crabs and centipedes. The name “trilobite” means “three lobes” referring to the axial lobe (running down the center along the length of the animal) and the two pleural lobes, one on each side. They  also have three parts the other way: a head, thorax and pygidium (the tail end).

Elrathia kingii is a ptychopariid trilobite found in extraordinary numbers in Middle Cambrian dark shales and limestones. There is a geological story here, two of them, in fact. One reason they are so common is that their populations were commonly buried by sediment stirred up in massive storms (Brett et al., 2009). They are among the only fossils found in organic-rich dark sediments because they lived in the harsh “exaerobic zone” at the very minimum of oxygen needed for animal life (Gaines and Droser, 2003). They apparently were the first large invertebrates to exploit this marginal environment.
Elrathia kingii gives us the opportunity to meet a pioneering American paleontologist: Fielding Bradford Meek (1817-1876). He originally described this species in 1870, calling it Conocoryphe kingii (see above). Paleontologists are quite familiar with the name “Meek” following a fossil species because he described hundreds of them. Meek was a native of Madison, Indiana, a place where Ordovician fossils are abundant and easily collected. He was apparently an unsuccessful businessman so he jumped at a chance in 1848 to work for the U.S. government surveying the geology of Iowa. Meek was good at this job and soon was working with James Hall in New York, the country’s premier paleontologist. Meek was eventually based in Washington, D.C., with the United States geological and geographical surveys. After many accomplishments in government service, he died of tuberculosis in 1876 (White, 1896).

Fielding Bradford Meek

References:

Brett C.E., Allison P.A., DeSantis M.K., Liddell W.D. and Kramer A. 2009. Sequence stratigraphy, cyclic facies, and lagerstätten in the Middle Cambrian Wheeler and Marjum Formations, Great Basin, Utah. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 277: 9-33.

Gaines, R.R. and Droser, M.L. 2003. Paleoecology of the familiar trilobite Elrathia kingii: An early exaerobic zone inhabitant. Geology 31: 941–944.

White, C.A. 1896. Memoir of Fielding Bradford Meek, 1817-1876. Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences, p. 75-91.

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Teaching Mineralogy, Petrology, and Geochemistry

mpollock August 10, 2011 5:35 pm

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – If you haven’t been following my twitter feed (http://twitter.com/meagenpollock), you may not know that I’ve been at the 2011 Cutting Edge Workshop on Teaching Mineralogy, Petrology, and Geochemistry (twitter hashtag #sercMPG). Expert educators have gathered to discuss teaching strategies, develop course materials, and exchange ideas about issues in MPG. Fortunately, the Cutting Edge runs several workshops across the geoscience disciplines (look for the updates in September), which have generated an invaluable collection of teaching resources. You’ll be able to find all of the materials from this workshop on the web and we’ll be adding more teaching activities soon after the workshop ends. Here’s a quick (and incomplete) list of resources that I’ve discovered:

Please comment here or add to the Cutting Edge collection if you have useful MPG teaching resources!

According to the Cutting Edge: "Core of Ely Greenstone outside Pillsbury Hall, home of the Geology & Geophysics Department at the University of Minnesota. Metamorphosed Archean basalt pillows are visible in the core, which is approximately 2 meters tall. Photo by Sharon Kressler." Aka: What I want for my next birthday!

 

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Using the iPad in museum work

Mark Wilson August 8, 2011 8:00 pm

COLUMBUS, OHIO–Earlier this summer my colleagues and I had blog posts describing how we use our iPads in geological fieldwork (with examples from the limestones of Estonia to the basalts of Iceland). Today I used my iPad2 during work in the collections of the Orton Geological Museum at The Ohio State University.

The simple camera utility built into the iPad2 makes recording quick images of specimens in their drawers and trays very easy. The LED backlighting makes the large image on the screen brighter than the actual view, which you can see in the photo above. Combine this with the light weight of the computer and it is actually easier to use the iPad2 for these images than a standard digital camera. The quality of the iPad2 image is not as good as that from a camera (with flash or auxiliary lighting), but we’re just collecting initial views and labels with this process (see below).

As with the images collecting during fieldwork, I can easily annotate the museum photographs with a program like Sketchbook Express. (Circling features for later detailed camera photography is what I do most often — museum staff typically don’t like us drawing on the specimens themselves!) The Boxwave Stylus remains my favorite drawing tool on the iPad2.

The iPad2 is also the most convenient repository of scientific papers I have ever used. It can store thousands of pdfs for quick referencing. The luminous screen makes reading them in the typical dingy light of museum collections easy, and images and text can be expanded for more visual detail. (Try that with paper!) A laptop certainly does these same things, but far more awkwardly while hunched over a museum drawer. The program I use for pdfs is PDFReader Pro (with pdfs transferred through Dropbox), but my friend Bill Ausich at The Ohio State University showed me that iBooks is just as easy to use.

I like to store specimen images from other sources to compare to the fossils in the drawers before me — making identifications this quickly helps me decide which specimens to borrow for later work. I can store the images as jpg files in the iPad2 Photo library or view them as pdfs in PDFReader Pro.

If you can get a wireless connection in the museum (often quirky in old buildings), searching for the meaning of strange stratigraphic terms and archaic species names is obviously of great value. Again, tapping on the iPad2 held in one hand while looking at the specimens themselves is a qualitatively different experience than returning to the laptop in some dark corner. (I could never have guessed that there would be a computer more convenient than my trusty MacBook Pro.)

In summary, the iPad2 has quickly become indispensable for my paleontological work in museums.

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Keck Mission Accomplished

mpollock August 7, 2011 11:02 pm

WOOSTER, OH – After a month of hard work, the Iceland Keck group parted ways on Saturday. We arrived in Wooster immediately after returning from Iceland and put in a solid week of work in the lab, preparing our samples for thin sections and XRF analyses. In one week, the students produced over 120 thin section billets, powders, and pressed pellets, and almost as many glass beads. Even though the work was tedious and the hours were long, I think we’re all glad that we’ll have data at the start of the school year. Well done, team!

A dessicator full of pressed pellets ready to analyze on the XRF.

 

Challenges of lab work. We tracked the number of samples that were prepared. This student prepped 20 pressed pellets "of varying degrees of brilliance + some epic failures."

Katharine works her magic on the scale.

Erica grinds the saw marks off of her sample.

Nina presses a brilliant pellet.

Thad oxidizes his samples in the muffle furnace.

Emily celebrates a glass bead that hasn't cracked.

Brennan and Katie troubleshoot the GIS file.

Of course, our work isn’t complete. Once we have the chemistry and thin section observations, we can put the data into the context of the mapped field relationships to understand the volcanic history of one of the oldest central volcanoes in Iceland. We’ll have much to present at the Keck Symposium in the spring and are already looking forward to our reunion.

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Wooster’s Fossils of the Week: barnacle borings (Middle Jurassic of Israel)

Mark Wilson August 7, 2011 1:49 am

Tiny little trace fossils this week in a Jurassic crinoid stem from the Matmor Formation of the Negev Desert. They are borings produced by barnacles, which are sedentary crustaceans more typically found in conical shells of their own making. These barnacles are still around today, so we know quite a bit about their biology. (More on how in a minute.) These acrothoracican barnacles drill into shells head-down and then kick their legs up through the opening to filter seawater for food. They’ve been doing it since the Devonian Period (Seilacher, 1969; Lambers and Boekschoten, 1986).

This particular trace fossil is Rogerella elliptica Codez & Saint-Seine, 1958. It is part of a diverse set of borings in the Matmor Formation (Callovian) of Hamakhtesh Hagadol, Israel, recently described in Wilson et al. (2010).

We know so much about boring barnacles because Charles Darwin himself took an almost obsessive interest in them early in his scientific career. While on his famous voyage in the HMS Beagle, Darwin noticed small holes in a conch shell, and he dug out from one of them a curious little animal shown in the diagram below.


Cryptophialus Darwin, 1854

He called it “Mr. Arthrobalanus” in his zoological notes. He figured out early that it was a barnacle, but he was astonished at how different it was from others of its kind. He later gave it a scientific name (Cryptophialus Darwin, 1854) and took on the problem of barnacle systematics and ecology. Eight years and four volumes later his young son would ask one of his friends, “Where does your father do his barnacles?” The diversity of barnacles played a large role in Darwin’s intellectual development and, consequently, his revolutionary ideas about evolution (Deutsch, 2009).

Burrowing barnacle diagram from an 1876 issue of Popular Science Monthly.

References:

Codez, J. and Saint-Seine, R. de. 1958. Révision des cirripedes acrothoracique fossiles. Bull. Soc. géol. France 7: 699-719.

Darwin, C.R. 1854. Living Cirripedia, The Balanidae, (or sessile cirripedes); the Verrucidae. Vol. 2. London: The Ray Society.

Deutsch, J.S. 2009. Darwin and the cirripedes: Insights and dreadful blunders. Integrative Zoology 4: 316–322.

Lambers, P. and Boekschoten, G.J. 1986. On fossil and recent borings produced by acrothoracic cirripeds. Geologie en Mijnbouw 65: 257–268.

Seilacher, A. 1969. Paleoecology of boring barnacles. American Zoologist 9: 705–719.

Wilson, M.A., Feldman, H.R. and Krivicich, E.B. 2010. Bioerosion in an equatorial Middle Jurassic coral-sponge reef community (Callovian, Matmor Formation, southern Israel). Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 289: 93-101.

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A Keck Adventure at 66 North

mpollock July 28, 2011 3:28 pm

West Fjords, Iceland – We’re happy to report that the 2011 Iceland Keck crew has safely completed a productive field season. Nearly two weeks ago, a boat dropped us off in Hornstrandir, a nature preserve that encompasses most of the northern portion of the West Fjords. Our field area centered around Hrafnsfjordur, or Raven Fjord, in the southern extent of Hornstrandir. We had no idea that Hrafnsfjordur was a popular destination; it’s one of the primary drop-off and pick-up points for backpackers in the region. We must have seen at least half a dozen hikers during our stay. Hiking trails snake their way around the fjord and over the passes, which was fortunate for us since we had to access all of our field areas on foot.

A very still day in Hrafnsfjordur.

After a couple of days of recon hiking as a group, the students selected their projects and went to work. Most students chose to map a portion of the fjord, although one student focused on mapping and sampling dikes. Students worked in teams of two, each team being assisted by a faculty member.

A very sunny day in Hornstrandir.

Field work was challenging. Like our Alaskan colleagues, we had dramatic stream crossings, treks across snow, and hikes up steep terrain. Although we never saw a bear, we spotted an arctic fox in the distance. Thankfully, the fox wasn’t interested in our food. Dehydrated meals at the end of a long field day never tasted so good!

Coast guard performing drills outside our hostel in Isafjordur.

The weather was mostly good, by Iceland standards. It seems as if we were constantly confronted with either bugs, wind, or rain, but always just one at a time. Whenever Emily worked in her area, though, the sun would shine!

Hiking up snow to reach the peak.

We took a chartered boat back to Isafjordur on Wednesday and spent one last day in the field mapping a local mountain called Sauratindur. Now that we’re finished with field work and have returned to civilization, we realize how thankful we are for hot showers and soft mattresses. Still, there are some things that we’re already missing: the view from our tents, the sound of the waterfall (especially at night), the soft moss, our own private fjord, the hot cocoa, our special treat at the end of each day, and the freshness of the air.

Our Keck adventure in Hrafnsfjordur, in Hornstrandir.

Tomorrow, we start our long journey back to the states (via Reykjavik). We’re eager to get back to Wooster to start processing our samples. Hrafnsfjordur offered us an amazing amount of what we think are intermediate lava flows, which would be unique for Iceland. Dominated by basalt with local regions of rhyolite around central volcanoes, intermediate lavas are relatively sparse. Our field mapping, thin section observations, and geochemical analyses should yield some insights into the formation of Hrafnsfjordur’s central volcano. Stay tuned!

Panorama from the top of Manafell in Hrafnsfjordur.

Students playing a game of rock while waiting on the boat.

Textbook hanging valley in Isafjordur.

The boat that came to pick us up- one trip for gear and rocks!

The view from my tent in Hranfsfjordur, Keck.

Familiar scene for geo types- hiking up waterfall cuts for good exposure.

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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: An edrioasteroid (Upper Ordovician of Kentucky)

Mark Wilson July 24, 2011 1:17 am

This week’s fossil appeared previously in this blog when we discussed hiatus concretions and their fossil fauna. It is one of my favorites for both how we found it (see the entry linked above) and the way it introduced me to hard substrate fossils (it was my first). The edrioasteroid is the circular fossil in the center. Above it is a branching cyclostome bryozoan that will be the subject of another story someday. These fossils were found in the Kope Formation (Cincinnatian Group) of the Upper Ordovician in northern Kentucky, making them about 450 million years old.

Edrioasteroids (“seated stars”) were echinoderms (spiny-skinned animals) that lived from the Cambrian through the Permian periods (Sumrall, 2009). Their living relatives today include sea stars, sea urchins, sand dollars and crinoids. Edrioasteroids have a flattened disk-like body called a theca covered with plates of calcite. They attached themselves to hard substrates like shells, hardgrounds or cobbles (as in the photo above). On the upper surface of the theca are ambulacra extending outward from a central mouth. The anus is a little circular set of plates between two of the ambulacra. The ambulacra themselves had tiny little tube feet that extended upwards into the seawater  for filter-feeding suspended organic matter.

The fossil above, also represented in the diagram below, is Cystaster stellatus (Hall, 1866). It is a small edrioasteroid, as the group goes, and is characterized by straight, wide ambulacra.

(Image from the Cincinnati Dry Dredgers’ wonderful website.)

(Image from the public domain Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition.)

Edrioasteroids are favorite fossils for collectors. I learned this when I published a paper on the fauna that included the fossils above (Wilson, 1985) and later the outcrop was pillaged — not a single edrioasteroid remains there from the hundreds originally found.

References:

Sumrall, C.D. 2009. First definite record of Permian edrioasteroids; Neoisorophusella maslennikovi n. sp. from the Kungurian of northeast Russia. Journal of Paleontology 83: 990-993.

Wilson, M.A. 1985. Disturbance and ecologic succession in an Upper Ordovician cobble-dwelling hardground fauna. Science 228: 575-577.

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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: Pelican’s-foot snail (Pliocene of Cyprus)

Mark Wilson July 17, 2011 12:27 am

This week’s fossil was found on the same 1996 Keck Geology Expedition to Cyprus that produced the Thorny Oyster highlighted in January. Stephen Dornbos (’97) was there, but this fossil was not part of the Pliocene coral reef complex he and I described (Dornbos & Wilson, 1999), but it was in nearby shallow marine embayment muddy sediments.

The pelican’s-foot snail is Aporrhais pespelecani (Linnaeus, 1758). It got its common name before Linnaeus because of its resemblance to a pelican’s webbed foot. When the snail reached a mature size, it extended the outer lip of its aperture into spines as an anti-predatory defense (probably against crabs) and as possibly a way to spread its weight (“footprint”, if you like) on soft sediment.

A. pespelecani belongs to the Superfamily Stromboidea, a very large group that includes familiar snails like the true conch (Strombus). A recent morphological analysis suggests they are also related to the carrier shells (Xenophoridae), although genomic sequencing is needed for support (Simone, 2005).

The pelican’s-foot snail lives today in the eastern Atlantic as well as the Baltic, Black and Mediterranean seas. It is a carnivore on clams and has the ability to “flick” its muscular foot to escape predators.

These distinctive shells have been known in Europe for a very long time. I like this particular illustration by Niccolò Gualtieri (1688–1744) in which they appear to be dancing:

As is often the case with writing these little essays, I learned something about a brilliant scientist now almost forgotten. Niccolò Gualtieri was a Florentine polymath skilled in medicine, poetry, drawing, and the developing natural sciences. He had his own shell museum, so he can be said to be one of the first conchologists.

I’m sure we shared Gualtieri’s delight when we first saw these distinctive shells scattered across a dry Cypriot plain.

References:

Dornbos, S.Q. and Wilson, M.A. 1999. Paleoecology of a Pliocene coral reef in Cyprus: Recovery of a marine community from the Messinian Salinity Crisis. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie, Abhandlungen 213: 103-118.

Gualtieri, N. 1742. Index Testarum Conchyliorum, quae adservantur in Museo Nicolai Gualtieri (“List of the shells of shellfish which are preserved in the museum of Niccolò Gualtieri”).

Manganelli, G. and Benocci, A. 2011. Niccolò Gualtieri (1688–1744): biographical sketch of a pioneer of conchology. Archives of Natural History 38: 174-177.

Simone, L.R.L. 2005. Comparative morphological study of representatives of the three families of Stromboidea and the Xenophoroidea (Mollusca, Caenogastropoda), with an assessment of their phylogeny. Arquivos de Zoologia 37: 141–267.

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2011 Keck Iceland is Official

mpollock July 15, 2011 5:35 pm

2011 Keck Iceland Group on columns.

ICELAND – As Lindsey and Travis were leaving Iceland, the Keck students were arriving. The Keck Geology Consortium consists of 18 schools whose geology departments are dedicated to providing undergraduates with high-quality research experiences. Funded through NSF and contributions from its members, the Keck Consortium supports several research projects each year. This year, I’m working with Dr. Brennan Jordan (University of South Dakota) on a 6-student Keck project in the West Fjords of Iceland. We’ll spend three weeks working in the field, then return to Wooster for another week in the lab.

After spending a day in Reykjavik recovering from jet lag and getting to know each other, we left for a four-day field trip to south central Iceland. The field trip serves several purposes: (1) build a sense of community, (2) get a sense for the provisions we’ll need in the field, and (3) observe geologic features that might be exposed in our study site.

We started by touring the Reykjanes Peninsula, visiting some sites that Travis and Lindsey had just seen. We observed marine pillow basalts, tuffs with embedded blocks, a dike feeding a lava flow, and lots of fissures. We ended the first day at Thingvellir and had our first taste of the dehydrated meals that will be our dinners for the time we’re in our field area. We all agreed that they tasted better and were more filling than we expected!

The second day began at an amazing exposure of subglacial pillow basalts. We almost didn’t get to visit this site because a film crew was shooting a car commercial at the exposure (complete with a thundering herd of Icelandic horses). Fortunately, they were kind enough to let us in for a short time, and it was worth it! Afterward, we visited Geysir (the original) and Gullfoss, where we saw glacial striations and a stunning waterfall.

Amazing pillow basalts near Thingvellir.

The second day ended (and the third day began) at Landmannalauger, a popular hot spring destination (I’ll let the Keck students tell you about their hot spring experience). Landmannalauger is surrounded by rhyolite slopes that form the walls of a giant caldera. Just behind the campground, a hiking trail winds its way over a blocky rhyolite flow, where we observed lots of flow banding, obsidian, and pumice altered to a beautiful green color. On the way out of Landmannalauger, we saw a few more rhyolite flows, a gorgeous cinder cone, and some Hekla tephra. You may recall that Hekla was recently reported in the news as “ready to erupt.” Rest assured that all was peaceful when we were there.

Before we returned to Reykjavik on the last day, we made a couple of quick stops in south-central Iceland near Dyrholaey to see spectacular columnar joints.

Dike intruding through tuff on the southern Reykjanes peninsula.

Back in Reykjavik, we caught our flight to Isafjordur in the West Fjords. We’re all eager and ready to go to our field site. Having seen a wide range of geologic features, we feel prepared for whatever our field site offers. Tomorrow, we’ll take a boat to the site, one of the most remote places in Iceland. Look for another post when we return from the field. Wish us luck!

*Sorry about the lack of pictures! If you know a way to post pictures to a blog from the iPad, please let me know! As an alternative, feel free to check out the pictures that I’ve posted on my twitter feed: twitter.com/meagenpollock

[Images added on July 18, 2011, from Meagen Pollock’s Twitter feed.]

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Exploring the Silurian at the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet in Stockholm: Last day of work for the Wooster Geology Estonia Team

Mark Wilson July 12, 2011 11:34 am

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN–No paleontological expedition is complete until it includes time in the collections of a museum. No single sampling trip like ours can describe the full diversity of a fossil site, no matter how many days we spend scouring the rocks. A traditional museum will combine the finds of hundreds of scientists over two centuries or more. The very best natural history museums, such as the Natural History Museum in London, the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, and, of course, the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet in Stockholm (shown above), have international collections from around the world. They set global standards for the documentation of living and extinct biodiversity. They are cathedrals of science to which we make regular pilgrimages, with all the awe and obligation that word includes.

The Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet (Royal Museum of Natural History; NRM) has the best collection of Silurian fossils in northern Europe, so we were anxious to go through the drawers and learn what we could about our own Silurian observations in Estonia. Thanks to Jonas Hagström, Senior Assistant Palaeontologist, we were given full access to the Silurian paleontology section.

Rachel Matt investigating the contents of a drawer in the NRM Silurian collections. Note the proper way of pulling open a specimen drawer: always have the drawer beneath partly open in case you accidentally pull the top drawer out too far!

The specimen drawers typically contain fossils in little cardboard trays with paper labels and a variety of stickers and numbers. Half the fun in a museum is figuring out what the organizational system is, then reading labels written in 19th Century cursive. (And in this case, in Swedish!)

Rachel making a simple photographic record of those fossils she finds that are similar to ours or should otherwise be documented for our work. Note that she has her computer open so that she can compare our field images to the museum specimens.

Nick found an excellent collection of eurypterids from the Rootsiküla Formation (Wenlock) in Estonia. He worked with these rocks in the field, but did not find any recognizable eurypterid fossils. Now he has a nice photographic collection of those in the NRM Silurian section.

After we finished our work in the collections, we toured the public displays in the NRM main building. They are fantastic. One of the highlights was this Silurian diorama showing many of our favorite extinct animals. By now you should be able to identify most of them!

Our final portrait of the trip: Nick Fedorchuk and Rachel Matt with an appropriately menacing Tyrannosaurus rex in the background. Tomorrow we leave for home! It has been an exciting adventure of science and culture.

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