Tag Archives: fossils

Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A mastodon tooth (Late Pleistocene of Holmes County, Ohio)

Mark Wilson March 20, 2011 12:21 am

Time for a vertebrate fossil from the College of Wooster paleontology collections.  Above is a side view of an American Mastodon tooth (Mammut americanum) from the Pleistocene of the county just south of us. It has been passed around through … Continue reading →

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Trilobites! Now it’s a field trip.

Mark Wilson March 18, 2011 8:41 pm

Just kidding about the trilobite requirement for a true field trip, but we must acknowledge a certain charm that comes only from these spiny little beasts. Thanks to my buddy Matthew James, we were directed to an especially fossiliferous set … Continue reading →

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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A sweet local scallop (Lower Carboniferous of Wooster)

Mark Wilson March 13, 2011 1:56 am

The delicious scallop has a long, long history. Wooster’s variety, known as Aviculopecten subcardiformis, is about 345 million years old. The beauty above was found in the Logan Formation, a conglomeratic sandstone that underlies much of the city, including the … Continue reading →

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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A tiny sclerobiont community (Middle Jurassic of Poland)

Mark Wilson March 6, 2011 1:15 am

This delightful little community is the subject of a current research project that developed from Independent Study fieldwork in 2006. Elyse Zavar (’07) and I traveled to southern Poland to work on Jurassic fossils associated with a carbonate hardground at … Continue reading →

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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: The ‘osses ‘ed clam (Upper Jurassic of southwestern England)

Mark Wilson February 27, 2011 1:16 am

Katherine Nicholson Marenco (’03) and I did delightful fieldwork on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, England, during the summer of 2002. We collected fossils from the famous Portland Limestone (Upper Jurassic) in a series of working quarries. Katherine completed … Continue reading →

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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A honeycomb coral (Upper Ordovician of southern Indiana)

Mark Wilson February 20, 2011 1:22 am

Polygons are common in nature, whether in two dimensions as desiccation cracks or in three dimensions as with columnar basalt. They result from “closely-packed” disks or tubes. The honeycomb coral (Favosites Lamarck 1816) is one of the best fossil examples … Continue reading →

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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A brittle star trace fossil from the Jurassic of Utah

Mark Wilson February 13, 2011 1:24 am

This week we have a trace fossil that looks almost exactly like the animal that made it. A trace fossil is evidence of organism activity recorded in the rock record. The photograph above shows one of my favorite specimens: Asteriacites … Continue reading →

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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A chewed-up leaf (Upper Cretaceous of Kansas)

Mark Wilson February 6, 2011 1:17 am

This week’s fossil is a departure from our usual set of marine invertebrate animals. Above is a leaf of Viburnum lesquereuxii from the Dakota Formation of Ellsworth County, Kansas. The rocks enclosing it are from the Upper Cretaceous Cenomanian Stage, … Continue reading →

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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: The Multidisciplinary European Thorny Oyster (Pliocene of Cyprus)

Mark Wilson January 30, 2011 1:56 am

In the summer of 1996, I was a co-director of  a Keck Geology Consortium project on the island of Cyprus. My students and I worked on the hot central plains far from the well known ophiolite complex in the cool … Continue reading →

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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A most unlikely clam — rudists from the Upper Cretaceous of the Oman Mountains

Mark Wilson January 23, 2011 1:08 am

This week’s fossil was collected on a memorable trip in 2000 to the United Arab Emirates and Oman with my friend Paul Taylor, an invertebrate paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. We were there to study hard substrate … Continue reading →

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