Tag Archives: Ordovician

An Exciting Trip to Tour Unconventional Oil and Gas Wells

Rebecca Matecha November 10, 2023 4:30 pm

This semester’s Geology of Energy Resources course, which focuses on how fossil fuels form, are extracted, and are used, had the opportunity to visit two unconventional oil and gas wells run by Ascent Resources located in southeastern Ohio this week. … Continue reading →

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A delightful little field trip in Ohio with a Polish-American team

Mark Wilson October 23, 2023 10:21 am

Today was astonishingly beautiful in Ohio: bright blue skies and the peak of fall leaf colors. By happy circumstance, I had three Polish paleontologist friends visiting Wooster after the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh last week. Greg … Continue reading →

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Work continues on our Ordovician paleoecology project

Mark Wilson October 11, 2023 3:38 pm

The Fall 2023 Paleoecology class is continuing to work on its Upper Ordovician fossil collections from our field trip at the beginning of the semester. Part of the class is shown above sorting their specimens and identifying them as precisely … Continue reading →

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A lovely day to visit the Ordovician seas of Indiana

Mark Wilson August 20, 2023 8:06 pm

This year’s Paleoecology class field trip was to a familiar place: a roadcut outside Richmond, Indiana, exposing the Whitewater Formation in the gorgeous Upper Ordovician System. We call it the catchy name “C/W-148” (N 39.78722°, W 84.90166°). It was a … Continue reading →

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Another new paper: A nestling brachiopod in an Ordovician boring and its implications

Mark Wilson June 8, 2023 9:54 am

I know, I know, several new papers lately. This spike in publications is a function of two things: The pandemic with its enforced isolation meant my colleagues and I had more time to finish manuscripts, and I belong to some … Continue reading →

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The Ordovician Bioclaustration Revolution: A new paper

Mark Wilson June 6, 2023 8:08 am

Bioclaustration is the process by which an organism is embedded within the growing skeleton of another. Bioclaustrations are fascinating in the fossil record because they give direct information about how two or more organisms lived together in the ancient past … Continue reading →

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A new paper on brachiopod symbiosis in the Early Paleozoic

Mark Wilson May 20, 2023 1:19 pm

My Estonian colleague and friend Olev Vinn and I have been working for many years on examples of parasitism recorded in the fossil record. For the last couple of years we have been summarizing the data and assessing paleoecological and … Continue reading →

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A new paper on symbiosis between brachiopods and bryozoans in the Late Ordovician of Estonia

Mark Wilson February 10, 2023 7:56 am

I’m pleased to announce another paper has appeared from our ongoing Estonian-German-American collaboration on symbiosis in the fossil record. The beautiful specimen above is the trepostome bryozoan Esthoniopora subsphaerica growing around a bioclaustration, forming a distinctive tube (Katian, Rakvere, northern … Continue reading →

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Paleoecology field trip to the Upper Ordovician of eastern Indiana: Haven’t done this for awhile!

Mark Wilson September 4, 2022 10:58 pm

Richmond, Indiana — Today Nick Wiesenberg (our invaluable geological technician), Brianna Lyman (my excellent Teaching Assistant), and I took the 15 students in the Paleoecology course to the fossiliferous Upper Ordovician of eastern Indiana (upper Whitewater Formation). It’s a location … Continue reading →

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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: Encrusted strophomenid brachiopods from the Upper Ordovician of northern Kentucky (and the old concave-up or concave-down controversy)

Mark Wilson April 24, 2022 12:05 pm

After the delightful Joint North-Central and Southeastern Section Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Cincinnati this month, some of the Wooster Geologists visited a fossiliferous exposure of the Bellevue Formation (Upper Ordovician, Katian) along the Bullitsville Road in … Continue reading →

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