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- A Tradition Continues: Richmond, Indiana – Paleoecology, Fall 2025
- Muscle scars in tiny conical fossils: A new paper describing the musculature of Devonian tentaculitids from Armenia and what they mean for the biology and evolution of the group
- Possible Linkages Between Climate and Human History in Ohio (the 4.2 yr. ka interval)
- A spotty Middle Ordovician trilobite from Estonia: A new paper describing an ancient parasitic infection
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Tag Archives: Fossil of the Week
Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: a baculitid ammonite (Cretaceous of Wyoming)
This is a specimen I often place on my Invertebrate Paleontology course lab tests. It is the “straight” ammonite Baculites, which is common enough, but the shell and internal walls (septa) have dissolved completely away, leaving this strangely articulated set … Continue reading
Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: an Italian keyhole limpet (Pliocene of Cyprus)
This week’s fossil is a beautiful little gastropod (snail) scientifically known as Diodora italica (Defrance, 1820), and commonly as the Italian Keyhole Limpet. I collected it with Steve Dornbos (’97) during the 1996 Keck Geology Expedition to Cyprus, where it … Continue reading
Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A carrier shell snail (Recent, Pacific Ocean)
OK, it’s true: our Fossil of the Week is not actually a fossil. (The “Recent” in the title was a clue.) I bought this shell at the Wayne County Fair and it was so beautiful it just had to make … Continue reading
Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: an aberrant brachiopod (Permian of Texas)
Funny word to apply to a fossil: aberrant, meaning “deviating from the normal”. It’s an old-fashioned word rarely used these days, primarily because we have a hard time defining “normal”. It was the word used when I was introduced to … Continue reading
Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: an oreodont (probably from the Oligocene of Nebraska)
Oreodonts are extraordinarily common fossils in the Oligocene of North America. Just about every teaching fossil collection contains at least a couple oreodont skulls, most obtained during late Nineteenth-Century field trips to the Great Plains. Our specimen above is of … Continue reading
Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: a venerid bivalve (Upper Cretaceous of Jordan)
This summer I joined a team describing a shell bed in the Upper Cretaceous (lower Campanian, about 80 million years old) Wadi Umm Ghudran Formation exposed northeast of Amman, Jordan (at N 32° 09.241′, E 36° 12.960′, to be exact). … Continue reading
Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A tabulate coral (Middle Devonian of New York)
This week’s specimen is from a group of fossils I gave my Invertebrate Paleontology students as “unknowns” to identify. Since it is their very first week of class I expected them to struggle, but many did remarkably well. (Congratulations to … Continue reading
Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A trilobite hypostome (Upper Ordovician of southern Ohio)
We had a familiar trilobite last week, so this week we’ll look at a poorly-known part of a trilobite: the hypostome. Above is an incomplete forked, conterminant hypostome of the large trilobite Isotelus. (Isotelus, by the way, is the state … Continue reading
Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A trilobite (Middle Cambrian of Utah)
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 … Continue reading
Wooster’s Fossils of the Week: barnacle borings (Middle Jurassic of Israel)
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 … Continue reading