Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A Conulariid (Lower Carboniferous of Indiana)

Mark Wilson April 14, 2017 12:01 am

I have some affection for these odd fossils, the conulariids. When I was a student in the Invertebrate Paleontology course taught Dr. Richard Osgood, Jr., I did my research paper on them. I had recently found a specimen in the nearby Lodi City Park. It was so different from anything I had seen that I wanted to know much more. I championed the then controversial idea that they were extinct scyphozoans (a type of cnidarian including most of what we call today the jellyfish). That is now the most popular placement for these creatures today, although I arrived at the same place mostly by luck and naïveté. (I love the critical marks in that word! And yes, I always have to look them up.)

The specimen above is Paraconularia newberryi (Winchell) found somewhere in Indiana and added to the Wooster fossil collections before 1974. (The scale below it is in millimeters.) A close view (below) shows the characteristic ridges with a central seam on one of the sides.
Conulariids range from the Ediacaran (about 550 million years ago) to the Late Triassic (about 200 million years ago). They survived three major extinctions (end-Ordovician, Late Devonian, end-Permian), which is remarkable considering the company they kept in their shallow marine environments suffered greatly. Why they went extinct in the Triassic is a mystery.

The primary oddity about conulariids is their four-fold symmetry. They had four flat sides that came together something like an inverted and extended pyramid. The wide end was opened like an aperture, although sometimes closed by four flaps. Preservation of some soft tissues shows that tentacles extended from this opening. Their exoskeleton was made of a leathery periderm with phosphatic strengthening rods rather than the typical calcite or aragonite. (Some even preserve a kind of pearl in their interiors.) Conulariids may have spent at least part of their life cycle attached to a substrate as shown below, and maybe also later as free-swimming jellyfish-like forms.

It is the four-fold symmetry and preservation of tentacles that most paleontologists see as supporting the case for a scyphozoan placement of the conulariids. Debates continue, though, with some seeing them as belonging to a separate phylum unrelated to any cnidarians. This is what’s fun about extinct and unusual animals — so much room for speculative conversations!

[Thanks to Consuelo Sendino of The Natural History Museum (London) for correcting the age range of these fascinating organisms.]

References:

Hughes, N.C., Gunderson, G.D. and Weedon, M.J. 2000. Late Cambrian conulariids from Wisconsin and Minnesota. Journal of Paleontology 74: 828-838.

Van Iten, H. 1991. Evolutionary affinities of conulariids, p. 145-155; in Simonetta, A.M. and Conway Morris, S. (eds.). The Early Evolution of Metazoa and the Significance of Problematic Taxa. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

[Modified from an original post on July 31, 2011]

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Wooster’s Fossils of the Week: Bivalve escape trace fossils (Devonian and Cretaceous)

Mark Wilson April 7, 2017 12:01 am

It is time again to dip into the wonderful world of trace fossils. These are tracks, trails, burrows and other evidence of organism behavior. The specimen above is an example. It is Lockeia James, 1879, from the Dakota Formation (Upper Cretaceous). These are traces attributed to infaunal (living within the sediment) bivalves trying to escape deeper burial by storm-deposited sediment. If you look closely, you can see thin horizontal lines made by the clams as they pushed upwards. These structures belong to a behavioral category called Fugichnia (from the Latin fug for “flee”). They are excellent evidence for … you guessed it … ancient storms.
The specimens above are also Lockeia, but from much older rocks (the Chagrin Shale, Upper Devonian of northeastern Ohio). Both slabs show the fossil traces preserved in reverse as sediment that filled the holes rather than the holes themselves. These are the bottoms of the sedimentary beds. We call this preservation, in our most excellent paleontological terminology, convex hyporelief. (Convex for sticking out; hyporelief for being on the underside of the bed.)

The traces we know as Lockeia are sometimes incorrectly referred to as Pelecypodichnus, but Lockeia has ichnotaxonomic priority (it was the earliest name). Maples and West (1989) sort that out for us.
Uriah Pierson James (1811-1889) named Lockeia. He was one of the great amateur Cincinnatian fossil collectors and chroniclers. In 1845, he guided the premier geologist of the time, Charles Lyell, through the Cincinnati hills examining the spectacular Ordovician fossils there. He was the father of Joseph Francis James (1857-1897), one of the early systematic ichnologists.

References:

James, U.P. 1879. The Paleontologist, No. 3. Privately published, Cincinnati, Ohio. p. 17-24.

Maples, C.G. and Ronald R. West, R.R. 1989. Lockeia, not Pelecypodichnus. Journal of Paleontology 63: 694-696.

Radley, J.D., Barker, M.J. and Munt, M.C. 1998. Bivalve trace fossils (Lockeia) from the Barnes High Sandstone (Wealden Group, Lower Cretaceous) of the Wessex Sub-basin, southern England. Cretaceous Research 19: 505-509.

[Originally published January 29, 2012]

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Wooster’s Fossils of the Week: A slab of Upper Ordovician bivalves from northern Kentucky

Mark Wilson March 31, 2017 12:01 am

Earlier this month, Luke Kosowatz, Matt Shearer and I went on a field trip through the Cincinnati region collecting Upper Ordovician (Katian) bryozoans and examples of bioerosion for their Independent Study projects and other investigations. I picked up the above slab and put it in our vehicle for future study not because of its beauty, but the preservational modes it displays. The black, rounded objects are bivalves, probably of the Order Modiomorphida. They are miserable fossils to identify because they originally had shells made of the mineral aragonite, which dissolved quickly after the animals died. What is left are a few scrappy molds and that black film. This is a common preservation of bivalves in the Cincinnatian.

This is the Corryville Formation outcrop from which the slab came. It is just west of Maysville, Kentucky, along the AA Highway (N 38.60750°, W 83.76775°; C/W-740).

Here is the slab along the roadside before we cleaned it up. Not much to see, really, except the low-relief black blobs that are remains of bivalves.

As you see, not much detail in the bivalves other than an outline matching somewhat the modiomorphids. Those of you with sharp paleontological eyes will note a round gray patch with radiating lines. This is a bryozoan that was attached to the bivalve shell. When the shell dissolved, the bryozoan attachment surface became visible. In other words, this is an upside-down encrusting bryozoan, a condition we’ve seen several times in this blog.

Here’s another bivalve with an upside-down encrusting bryozoan. This time you can see that the black film was underneath the bryozoan and on the outside of the bivalve shell. In a 2004 paper, Tim Palmer and I wrote: “We have also long been curious about why some of the epifaunal aragonitic Ordovician genera in the Cincinnatian such as Modiolopsis are preserved with a thick black outer shell covering (e.g. Pojeta 1971, pl. 15, fig. 6). It now seems likely that this was a hypertrophied periostracum that conferred some protection against dissolution during life, similar to the situation seen in Recent unionids that are susceptible to dissolution in their fresh-water habitats” (p. 425). Maybe it’s time we followed up on these speculations? I’m sure other paleontologists have had similar ideas.

Among the indistinct modiomorphid bivalves is this old friend: Ambonychia with its characteristic radiating ridges.

References:

Palmer, T.J. and Wilson, M.A. 2004. Calcite precipitation and dissolution of biogenic aragonite in shallow Ordovician calcite seas. Lethaia 37: 417-427.
Pojeta, J. 1971. Review of Ordovician pelecypods. United States Geological Survey, Professional Paper 695, 1-46.
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Dating the Tracy House (Apple Creek, Ohio)

gwiles March 25, 2017 8:42 am

Climate Change 2017 is pleased to have been asked to date the Tracy House, Apple Creek Ohio. The log house/cabin is now stored in the soon to be Apple Creek Community Center and Library will be reassembled this coming summer. The date is unambiguous and most of the timber was cut after the growing season of 1826 and it is likely that the house was originally constructed in 1827, one of the first to be built in the East Union Township. A copy of our report can be found here.
The class cores an old growth living tree to help assemble a calendar dated tree ring chronology.

Dean extracts a core from a beam of the Tracy House under the watchful eye of Annette – the TA, as Conner looks on.

Extracting a core being careful to preserve the outer ring of the core (don’t bend the extractor John).

Another successful core extracted.


Graph showing an 100 year overlap between the North East Ohio (NEO) living ring-width chronology and the ring-width chronology from the Tracy House. For the full 230 year period of overlap the correlation is 0.75 – pretty impressive, it shows the power of tree-ring dating and the sensitivity of white oak to climate in Ohio. To learn more about the utility of this data view this.

 

Special thanks to the Apple Creek Historical Society for working with us on this project.

The group resting after work on a 70 degree F day in February at Browns Lake Bog where they cored some of the remnant old growth oak stands of Northeast Ohio (above). The group getting the run down at Apple Creek (below).

 

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Wooster’s Fossils of the Week: Strophomenid brachiopods from the Upper Ordovician of southern Ohio

Mark Wilson March 24, 2017 12:01 am

Usually I find fossils in the field or lab and then craft a Fossil of the Week entry around them. This time, though, I started with a paper and then searched for fossils to illustrate it. I found this recent paper very well done:

Bauer, J.E. and Stigall, A.L. 2016. A combined morphometric and phylogenetic revision of the Late Ordovician brachiopod genera Eochonetes and Thaerodonta. Journal of Paleontology 90: 888-909.

It does classic systematics on a group of brachiopods with the modern tools of morphometric and phylogenetic analyses. Its conclusions are direct and convincing: The genus Thaerodonta is synonymous with Eochonetes, and a variety of species are shifted around, solving problems that have lingered for over a century, Plus as a bonus, who can’t love a new species named Eochonetes voldemortus? So I set out to find specimens of this brachiopod group in our collections. Above are internal valve views of the brachiopod Eochonetes clarksvillensis (Foerste, 1912), showing characteristic denticles (little teeth) along the hinge line. Below are external valve views. Jen Bauer herself kindly confirmed the identifications!

These specimens come from the Waynesville Formation (Katian) exposed at Caesar Creek in southern Ohio, a place we have had many paleontology field trips. E. clarksvillensis is common in the Waynesville and overlying Liberty formations. Read much more about it in Bauer and Stigall (2016).

The genus Eochonetes was named by Frederick Richard Cowper Reed in 1917 from the Ordovician of Scotland. (The British Isles were not too far away from Ohio in the Late Ordovician.) Reed was born in London in 1869 and died in Cambridge, England, in 1946. I tried mightily but could find no images of him to enter into the digital archives of the web. He was a smart and diverse geologist, attending Trinity College, Cambridge, and winning important awards and scholarships. He was appointed assistant to the Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge in 1892, a position he kept until retirement. In 1901 he earned the Sedgwick Prize for his work on the rivers of East Yorkshire, wrote a book on the geology of the British Empire (much easier to do today!), and yet still found time to describe fossils in numerous papers.

The author of Eochonetes clarksvillensis is much better known to paleontologists of the Cincinnati region. It is August F. Foerste (1862-1936), who named Thaerodonta clarksvillensis in 1912. Foerste grew up and worked in the Dayton, Ohio, area, graduating from Denison University after publishing many papers as a student. He returned to Dayton after earning a PhD from Harvard, teaching high school for 38 years. When he retired he turned down a teaching position at the University of Chicago and instead worked at the Smithsonian Institution until the end of his life. He is one of the giants of the Cincinnati School of paleontology.

References:

Bauer, J.E. and Stigall, A.L. 2016. A combined morphometric and phylogenetic revision of the Late Ordovician brachiopod genera Eochonetes and Thaerodonta. Journal of Paleontology 90: 888-909.

Reed, F.R.C. 1917. The Ordovician and Silurian Brachiopoda of the Girvan District: Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 51: 795–998.

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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A large trepostome bryozoan on a nautiloid conch (Upper Ordovician of northern Kentucky)

Mark Wilson March 17, 2017 12:01 am

This massive trepostome bryozoan, a solid lump of biogenic calcite, was collected earlier this week on the latest Team Cincinnati field expedition into the treasure-filled Upper Ordovician underlying and surrounding that city. Wooster students Matt Shearer, Luke Kosowatz and I are pursuing projects related to trepostome bryozoans and bioerosion (the biological destruction of hard substrates). The above specimen combines both these worlds, and more. Note the concavity at the base of the specimen. It comes from the Bellevue Formation (Katian) exposed on Bullitsville Road near the infamous Creation Museum (C/W-152).

Underneath the bryozoan colony (its zoarium) is this conical impression. It is an external mold of a straight nautiloid conch, the shell of a common squid-like cephalopod during the Ordovician. After the death of the nautiloid its empty tubular conch rested on the seafloor. This hard surface attracted the larvae of a variety of bryozoans that spread their calcitic zoaria (colonial skeletons) across the surface. Eventually one trepostome bryozoan species gained dominance over the space and occupied it all, growing into the large colony we see today. It even wrapped around the aperture of the conch (on the left) and grew a bit into the tube. Since the nautiloid conch was made of unstable aragonite, it long ago dissolved away, leaving an impression (external mold) in the stable calcite of the bryozoan.

How do we know there were earlier generations of bryozoans on this conch? We see them exposed upside-down on the surface of the external mold. Above we see the thin, branching cyclostome bryozoan Cuffeyella in the foreground, with a sheet of an encrusting trepostome bryozoan in the background. There are several other earlier bryozoans visible on this surface, revealing an ecological succession. There may be soft-bodied organisms preserved on this surface as well. This locality yielded the first described specimens of bioimmuration in the Ordovician (see Wilson et al., 1994).

There were other large trepostome bryozoans found in this same locality. I couldn’t resist cutting one in half to see what the inside looked like.

In this close view of the cross-section through the calcitic trepostome bryozoan we see numerous round holes drilled by some sort of worm seeking protective space so it could filter-feed. (In other words, it was not preying on the bryozoan.) The most intense boring of the specimen appears to have taken place just before and after the death of the colony. We know some borings were excavated into living bryozoan skeleton because the bryozoan formed reactive tissue around the intruder. The very tiny reddish-brown dots scattered in layers are “brown bodies“, the organic remnants of bryozoan polypides in their skeletal tubes (zooecia).

It has been a pleasure to return to the extraordinary Cincinnati fossils!

References:

Taylor, P.D. 1990. Preservation of soft-bodied and other organisms by bioimmuration—a review. Palaeontology 33: 1-17.

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

Wilson, M.A., Palmer, T.J. and Taylor, P.D. 1994. Earliest preservation of soft-bodied fossils by epibiont bioimmuration: Upper Ordovician of Kentucky. Lethaia 27: 269-270.

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Team Cincinnati heads home ahead of the storm (via Serpent Mound)

Mark Wilson March 13, 2017 9:10 pm

Wooster, Ohio — Matthew, Mark and Luke (if only we had a John!) left the field a day early, hightailing it from Maysville, Kentucky, to Wooster today before a large storm system brought snow, ice and freezing rain (delightfully called a “wintry mix”). We made a couple of stops in the Whitewater Formation near West Union, Ohio, but did not collect because we couldn’t be sure of the stratigraphic context of loose specimens. On the way back north we visited the Serpent Mound National Historic Landmark near Peebles, Ohio. Matt and Luke are shown above freezing on the observation tower early in the morning. Not surprisingly, we had the place to ourselves.

Luke and Matt at the state marker for Serpent Mound.

There is no vantage on the ground from which you can see the entire serpent effigy mound. This is the view from the tower looking across the body towards the head.

Above is the coiled tail. There is considerable debate about when this elaborate mound was constructed. Some radiocarbon dating places it at around 300 BCE, therefore built by the Adena people. Other dating indicates it was made about 1070 CE by the Fort Ancient culture. The site is on an ancient (very ancient — Permian!) meteorite impact crater, an astrobleme. No evidence of this structure is directly visible at the site, but a geological survey of the bedrock shows incredible disruption. The late Dr. Frank Koucky, a geology professor at The College of Wooster, did considerable research on what was then known as the Serpent Mound Cryptoexplosion Structure. I had many field trips here with him as a student.

This is the storm we escaped late today. Our field areas are essentially in the pink wintry mix belt. We would have ended the trip early in any case, though, because Matt and Luke were such efficient field paleontologists that they filled all our available boxes with fossils (see below) and we visited all the critical sites we needed. Luke now drives to his home in New Jersey, and Matt drives home to California. Their labwork will begin when they return to campus from Spring Break. More details on their projects and discoveries then!

Team Cincinnati’s fossils ready to be unpacked, washed, sorted and studied.

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Team Cincinnati moves into Kentucky for additional fieldwork

Mark Wilson March 12, 2017 11:12 pm

Maysville, Kentucky — It was another frigid morning under the clear, pitiless skies of the Cincinnati region, but Luke Kosowatz (’17) was in good spirits. He is collecting at our first stop of the day: an exposure of the Bellevue Formation (Upper Ordovician, Katian) along the Bullitsville Road in northern Kentucky (N 39.08121°, W 84.79230°; C/W-152). Luke is sorting out bioeroded bryozoans and brachiopods here.

Matt Shearer (’18) joins Luke on the outcrop. If the place looks familiar it’s because William Harrison (’15) and I were here almost exactly three years ago.

In cosmic irony, the Bullitsville outcrop is nearly a neighbor of the Creation Museum. It was closed this Sunday morning — who would have guessed? Do Creationists ponder the fact that their pseudoscientific establishment sits on an incredible record of fossils 450 million years old? They do indeed: “These conditions and processes would be expected during the global catastrophic Flood described in the Scriptures. The thin alternating coarse-grained limestone and fine-grained shale layers could be deposited quickly under such catastrophic conditions.” Of course.

We were also near Big Bone Lick State Park, the birthplace of American vertebrate paleontology.

This site has an excellent life-sized diorama of Late Pleistocene animals (mammoths, mastodons, bison, ground sloths and even vultures) getting mired in bogs infused with salty water.

Team Cincinnati then traveled east for about an hour to the magnificent exposures of the Cincinnatian Group around Maysville, Kentucky. Here we targeted the Corryville Formation exposed along the AA Highway (N 38.60750°, W 83.76775°).

As with all our sites, the fossils are extraordinary. This is an ordinary slab of limestone from the Corryville with dozens of well-preserved strophomenid brachiopods.

For nostalgia on my part, we visited an outcrop along US 62 at the southern edge of Maysville where the Corryville Formation is again exposed (N 38.60932°, W 83.81070°). It is at this site that I collected a cave-dwelling bryozoan fauna now the subject of a manuscript Caroline Buttler (National Museum Wales) and I are finishing up this month. The cave interval was destroyed by later roadwork, but the remaining outcrops were superb for our purposes.

We ended the field day about seven kilometers north at another outcrop of the Corryville along US 62 (N 38.6445°, W 83.77678°).  I was so distracted by the diversity of fossils that I forgot to take pictures!

Dinner was at El Caminante Mexican Restaurant in Maysville. It was so good we are compelled to recommend it to future geological visitors.

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Wooster Geologists launch Team Cincinnati 2017

Mark Wilson March 11, 2017 11:11 pm

Harrison, Ohio — Our first fieldwork of the year started on this cold, cold March day in southeastern Indiana. (Note the white icicles on the outcrop.) Luke Kosowatz, Matt Shearer and I have begun our projects in the magnificent Cincinnatian Group (Upper Ordovician, Katian) with its fantastic fossils on the first day of Wooster’s spring break. Despite the sunlight, it was 19°F when we had to leave the warm vehicle to start collecting fossils at our first stop shown above. This is the US 27 roadcut outside Richmond, Indiana, beloved by paleontologists (N 39.78631°, W 84.90318°). Here the upper Whitewater Formation is well exposed and weathered just right to release millions of fossils from their rocky tombs. Luke is studying patterns of bioerosion (almost entirely borings) in the Cincinnatian for his Independent Study thesis, and Matt is examining the distribution of bryozoan taxa for his I.S. work. We’ll have more details on their investigations later.

Today we started at the top of the Cincinnatian Group and worked our way down section as we moved south through Indiana towards the Ohio River. One of our sites was the Brookville Lake Dam emergency spillway exposure, seen above on the other end of the dam.

We climbed up the dam itself to get to the spillway exposure, which is magnificent. We did not collect here, though, because we couldn’t assure tight stratigraphic control of our specimens. There is too much downslope movement of fossils and rocks at this site for us to be certain about the horizons from which the fossils came.

Southgate Hill is a spectacular series of roadcuts north of St. Leon, Indiana (N 39.33909°, W 84.95306°). Matt and Luke are here collecting from the top of the Waynesville Formation.

Our last outcrop of the day was at the top of this sequence of limestones and shales exposed at another large roadcut, this one near Lawrenceburg, Indiana (N 39.09863°, W 84.87683°). At the very top is the rubbly Bellevue Formation, from which we collected magnificent trepostome bryozoans, many with beautiful borings.

Despite the temperatures, we had fun today and look forward to another three days of field paleontology in what must be the most fossiliferous rocks in the world. We are fortunate to live so close to these treasures.

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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: Encrusting craniid brachiopods (Upper Ordovician of southeastern Indiana)

Mark Wilson March 10, 2017 12:01 am

The two irregular patches above are brachiopods known as Petrocrania scabiosa encrusting the ventral valve of yet another brachiopod (Rafinesquina). That species name “scabiosa” is evocative if not a little unpleasant — it is also the root of the English “scab”.

Petrocrania scabiosa is in a group of brachiopods we used to call “inarticulates” because their two valves are not articulated by a hinge as they are in most brachiopods. Instead they are held together by a complex set of muscles. Now we place these brachiopods in the Class Craniforma, an ancient group which originated in the Cambrian and is still alive today.

Petrocrania scabiosa was a filter-feeder like all other brachiopods, extracting nutrients from the seawater with a fleshy lophophore. The Wooster specimens are part of our large set of encrusting fossils (a type of sclerobiont) in our hard substrate collection. They have irregular shells that are circular in outline when they grew alone, and angular when they grew against each other.

Some craniid brachiopods were so thin that their shells repeated the features of the substrate underneath them, a phenomenon known as xenomorphism (“foreign-form”).

Petrocrania scabiosa brachiopods (circular) on a Rafinesquina brachiopod, along with a trepostome bryozoan that encrusted some brachiopods and grew around others. The P. scabiosa on the far left shows xenomorphic features. Specimen borrowed from the University of Cincinnati paleontology collections.

A 2007 College of Wooster paleontology field trip to the Upper Ordovician locality near Richmond, Indiana, where these specimens were found. Students are in the traditional paleontological poses.

[Originally published May 22, 2011.]

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