Ordovician Snail: Paupospira bowdeni

Reading from the book A Sea without Fish, I discovered this snail is now known by a new name and also its location is pretty famous and unique. This gastropod (snail) was called Loxoplocus bowdeni but is now known as Paupospira bowdeni (page 125). It was found in Trimble County, Kentucky, USA in the Marble Hill Bed (Rowland Member of the Drakes Formation which is equivalent to the top of the Waynesville Formation). This information was documented by W.C. Swadley in 1979 in a paper entitled "The Marble Hill Bed: An Offshore Bar-Tidal Channel Complex in the Upper Ordovician Drakes Formation of Kentucky" in United States Geological Survey Professional Paper 1126-D. I cannot find the paper on JSTOR, it is listed as a reference to several papers I found.

The location described in the A Sea without Fish book, says the rock lenses with snails species: Paupospira bowdeni, Paupospira tropidophora (Meek), and Paupospira moorei (Ulrich) (page 127). I know what the first one looks like but the other two are somewhat of a mystery. They have a picture of Paupospira moorei on page 122 but it is covered by the tabulate coral Protaraea richmondensis.

The Marble Hill Bed seems to have been named by D.D. Owen in 1859 in a report entitled, "Report of a geological reconnaissance of the state of Indiana made in the year 1837 part 1" page 63. A document (Lithofacies of the Cincinnati Series) found here describes this location as a Gastropod Coquina. It also says that bryozoan and Hebertella brachiopod fragments could be found. I did find a nice brachiopod on the trip but I found a number of cephalopod fragments with the snails. This specimen was about 4 cm long but the papers say they get to be 5 cm in length at this location.

Ordovician Pelecypod - Ambonychia

I am continuing to read the book A Sea without Fish by David L. Meyer and Richard Arnold Davis about Ordovician fossils published in January 2009. Here are some pictures of a pelecypod (clam) from Trimble County, Kentucky. It is interesting because in their book they deal mostly with Ohio locations but they mention the site this fossil came from on pages 125-129. Their focus is on the gastropod beds in the Marble Hill Bed Rowland Member of the Drakes Formation (Katian - Richmondian) but I found this a layer below that.

What is nice about this fossil is the aragonite shell is pretty much intact. It appears this is somewhat of a rare occurrence. Usually, just a mold is left as they say in the book (pages 129-130) the shell must have had a high content of organic material. Using the Fossils of Ohio book and A Sea without Fish, this clam must be Ambonychia sp. Meyer and Davis refer to this pelecypod as an Epibyssate form which is one that "is attached to objects that are beneath the actual sediment-water interface of the sea floor."(page 284). I guess this would be opposed to ones that burrowed into the sediment.

This specimen is about 1 cm wide and 1.8 cm long. I found another that was 2.9 cm wide and 3.9 cm long but it was just a mold with on partial shell line impressions left at the back end of the clam .

You can see some other fossils found in Trimble County, Kentucky at the KYANA webpage on Ordovician fossils.

Note the pictures can be clicked on it make them show up larger.

Foerstephyllum Colonial Coral

Here is a colonial coral from the Upper Ordovician time period. It was found in eastern Jefferson County, Kentucky. It is probably 14 cm in diameter. It is probably some sort of Foerstephyllum (Bassler, 1941) from the extinct Tabulata coral group. There is a relatively new book entitled A Sea Without Fish - Life in the Ordovician Sea of the Cincinnati Region by David L. Meyer and Richard Arnold Davis with a chapter by Steven M. Holland. This type of coral is shown pages 76-78. They have a picture of an octagonal tool house built sometime in the early 1900s that is composed of colonial corals from the Richmondian coral beds in Madison, Indiana. The structure can be found in John Paul Park in Madison, Indiana. They also cite the work of Ruth Browne on these types of coral. Ruth was a Louisville geologist who did some research back in the 1960s and 1970s in this area.