Tag Archives: Ordovician

Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: an orthid brachiopod (Upper Ordovician of Indiana)

Mark Wilson November 27, 2011 12:56 am

This beautiful brachiopod is Vinlandostrophia ponderosa (Foerste, 1909), an orthid brachiopod from the Maysvillian (Upper Ordovician) of southern Indiana. Until recently it had been traditionally known as Platystrophia ponderosa until a critical paper by Zuykov and Harper (2007) investigated the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Fossils in the Wild: Invertebrate Paleontology Field Trip

Mark Wilson September 11, 2011 11:06 pm

CAESAR CREEK LAKE, OHIO–The 2011 Invertebrate Paleontology class had a productive field trip on a beautiful Ohio day. Thunderstorms roamed the state, but we saw them only when we were comfortably on the bus. We worked in the emergency spillway … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A trilobite hypostome (Upper Ordovician of southern Ohio)

Mark Wilson August 21, 2011 1:44 am

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A strange little echinoderm (Ordovician of Russia)

Mark Wilson June 12, 2011 1:44 am

This small fossil was completely new to me when I found it during my research trip to the Ordovician of Russia in the Fall of 2009.  A side view is shown on the left of this conical skeleton, and the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Wooster’s Fossils of the Week: Hyoliths (Middle Ordovician of Estonia)

Mark Wilson May 1, 2011 1:30 am

The fossils above are about as simple as fossils can be. They are internal molds (sediment-fills) of conical shells that were made of the carbonate mineral aragonite.  The aragonite shells dissolved away after death and burial, leaving the cemented sediment … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 61 Comments

Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A cystoid (Middle Ordovician of northeastern Estonia)

Mark Wilson January 16, 2011 1:26 am

Fossils don’t get much more spherical than Echinosphaerites aurantium, an extinct creature common in the Early and Middle Ordovician of North America and Europe. These are cystoids, a somewhat informal category of filter-feeding, stalked echinoderms that are relatives of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A three-branched graptolite (Lower Ordovician of southeastern Australia)

Mark Wilson January 9, 2011 2:22 am

This week I’m correcting a mistake I’ve been making in my paleontology courses for nearly thirty years. Our subject is a graptolite from the teaching collections — a specimen that has been at least cursorily examined by all of my … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The paleontology of hiatus concretions: fossils without sediment

Mark Wilson December 15, 2010 8:16 pm

Way back in 1984, when I was just a green Assistant Professor of Geology, my wife Gloria and I explored a series of Upper Ordovician (about 445 million years old) outcrops in northern Kentucky to plan a paleontology course field … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments