2000th Posting + The Hidden Lophophore Fossil

I have made it to my 2000th posting and I thought I would write about something special. In the past, I have marked other milestone postings with reviews of favorite fossils or most visited pages. You can find links to those at the end of this post, if you are curious.

This post is about maybe a unique discovery that has not been documented yet. Recently, I was testing x-ray sensors and while one can x-ray keys, pens, paper clips or calibration targets while testing, I got a bit more creative. I started to x-ray small fossils in my test image batch. Almost all of the time they were solid with a consistent layer but every so often I would see some other hidden details.

While taking an x-ray of a Devonian brachiopod Productella spinulicosta (Hall, 1867, aka Spinulicosta spinulicosta), I discovered it had a tube like structure embedded in its fossil form. It appears to be some sort of lophophore (feeding tube). My research has not found other images of lophophores from this genus of brachiopod so maybe this is the first time it has been visually documented. In x-ray images the green arrow points to the lophophore, light blue arrows point to spines.

As for this blog, I thought I would eventually run out of material to post but I continue to visit museums and on rare occasions field collect. Also my cousin Kenny has a nicer microscope/camera system that is yielding amazing images of microfossils he has been collecting. So I seem to have a good source of material to write about in the near future. Thanks for reading.

Previous milestone postings:

https://louisvillefossils.blogspot.com/2009/12/500-fossil-posts.html

https://louisvillefossils.blogspot.com/2011/07/blog-in-review-1000th-posting.html

https://louisvillefossils.blogspot.com/2018/07/10-years-of-blogging.html

500,000 Page View for Blog

Blogger.com, a web service that is part of Google, showed me a message today that my blog had passed over the half a million page view mark. For a fossil blog, that seems to be a pretty good accomplishment. Other metrics like the one I get from Google Analytics show a much lower number but I am not sure when I activated that service to track Internet activity. I do not think it can track if the viewer who does not have Javascript active so that makes the count smaller.

So I hope to keep plodding along posting fossil images and interesting geology information to the Internet using this blog.

Cheers!

Blog in Review- 1000th Posting

Writing this blog post marks the 1000th entry for Louisville Fossils on the Blogger system.  The journey so far has been educational as my curiosity leads me back in time to study long extinct creatures from millions to hundreds of millions of years ago.  It has provided an opportunity to improve my spelling of Latin based names of these creatures.  Also learn about other areas of the country and the world that have amazing fossils.

The blog has been some work and also fun.  Hopefully, I have helped some people with the information provided here and also with answers e-mailed to fossil questions sent to me.  The biggest surprise to me is the most popular entries in the blog were not about locally found fossils but of information about dinosaurs.  With that stated, here are links to the some of the most popular of my posts:

The January 23, 2010 images of the Louisville Zoo's Dinosaurs Alive! exhibit: CLICK HERE

Pictures of the cast of the Dracorex hogwartsia at the Indianapolis Children's Museum from November 17, 2009: CLICK HERE




A movie review of the IMAX movie Sea Rex shown at the Louisville Science Center June 14, 2010: CLICK HERE

Some fossils made it on the list as well.  My odd entry speculating I found the imprint of a Cladoselache shark fin in the New Albany Shale (July 8, 2010): CLICK HERE

St. Clair Pennsylvania fern fossils from my friend Dave at the blog Views of the Mahantango shown on April 19, 2010: CLICK HERE

A large Platystrophia ponderosa brachiopod found in the Louisville area shown February 2009: CLICK HERE

Some of the most common fossils looked for that search engines directed to the blog were: Hexagonaria, Rafinesquina, Tabulophyllum, Cryptolithus, Heliophyllum, Pleurodictyum, and Halysites.

Thanks for reading this blog and if you have any questions or what to see pictures of a particular fossil, feel free to e-mail me at louisvillefossils@gmail.com

500 Fossil Posts

This is my 500th blog post and to mark this milestone I will post some of the most popular fossils by Internet visits and then post a few images I have posted that are some of my favorites.  The blog was started in July 2008 and now has over 1,200 pictures in it.  In retrospect, maybe I should have called this blog, "A Fossil a Day" since that is about what it has turned into.

My main motivation for starting it was to have an electronic record of what I was finding or what people were showing me.  It also is a learning tool that keeps me researching different aspects of paleontology.  Another reason was to provide the Internet with some visual images of what a genus or species looked like in fossil form that could help out with school reports or hobbyist identifications.  I would like to thank Blogger and Google for providing this free service.  Their posting tools are great along with bandwidth and storage facilities.

Will I continue to post like this?  Time will tell.  I have collected maybe thousands of images and fossils that need to be posted.  Usually the issue is identification and specifics (e.g. location, time period, formation, history) of specimen that needs to be researched before the image goes on the Internet.  It might be better to have a site that has all the fossils organized by time period, type, or location.

This first fossil is one of the most popular viewed on the blog.  It is a Platystrophia brachiopod from the Ordovician Period.  It was found east of Louisville, Kentucky and is the state fossil of Kentucky.

This next fossil's name is a popular search term on the Internet.  It is the Heliophyllum horn coral found in Clark County, Indiana.  This particular specimen also has a Favosites clausus bryozoan growing on it.  It is from the Devonian Period and might have been found in the Beechwood Formation.

Here is a fern fossil from St. Clair, Pennsylvania.  I did not find this fossil but my friend Dave gave it to me.  I thought it would be a good idea to compare the fossil image to a living fern.  Thanks to Kenny for letting me take a picture of his fern.

This fossil is of a very small Ambonychia clam.  While not it the best shape, it is unique to me because it has an aragonite (or brown calcite) shell.  Most clams I find are just molds of the shell that has disintegrated over time.  It was found at Carroll County, Kentucky in the Kope Formation.

These next set of fossils are some of personal favorite images I have posted.

This fossil is an example of photographing the fossil sitting on a glass plate with blue color gradient behind it.  The coral is also neat in that is like a stone sponge.  It is called Favosites (aka Emmonsia) eximia found in Clark County, Indiana. It is from the Devonian Period and might be from either the Jeffersonville or Beechwood Formations.

I like the contrast of the green background and the white fossil in this image.  Also the different variations of the color green along with the shadowing of the fossil catch my attention.  The colonial coral is from the Ordovician Period and was subject to the work of a local paleontologist Ruth Browne.  It is probably a Foerstephyllum vacuum (Foerste, 1909) and was found in the Drake Formation of Jefferson County, Kentucky.

 

As they said in Ordovician times, "Carpoid diem!"