More Coral Finds

My cousin has once again helped me with a post. I mentioned that was running out of ideas for fossil posts without doing some more research and he sent me some pictures. Here are some of his recent finds from Jefferson County, Kentucky.

This first coral is from the Louisville Limestone and Middle Silurian Period. It is probably a genus Romingeria growing inside/on top of a stromatoporoid (sponge). I like the blue color of the fossil.

This one looks to be a nice sized colony of Coenites of the Middle Silurian Period. The interesting item is below the measurement scale. It looks to me to be some sort of holdfast. Fossil found in Louisville Limestone layer. This next picture of two Coenites coral fragments. The aspect this is somewhat different is most corals we find like this are flat or fanned out. These two are twisting upward as you can see from the shadow in the picture.

This last picture is of a small, delicate coral fossil. It might be a Middle Devonian Period Drymopora. This coral was found in the Jeffersonville Limestone layer.

Paleontology Books

My excursions around the Louisville Kentucky area and across the Ohio River into southern Indiana has brought many fossils for me to study. Unfortunately, I had few references for helping to identify what I was finding. My project to expand the KYANA Geological Society website to show fossils from some of the larger personal Louisville area fossils collections ran into some issues last December. So I proceeded in a new direction with this blog trying to show things I or people I know have been finding and then try to identify it.

My only reference besides the Internet was a book called Fossils of Ohio, Bulletin 70 from State of Ohio, Department of Natural Resources, Division of Geological Survey. While covering the state of Ohio, their geology is similar to that of Indiana and Kentucky so the information applicable. It does have its limits since it has to cover so much information for such a large state. I bought this book from the Falls of the Ohio State Park gift shop (when they still had one) years ago.




I just acquired this week and last, two more books that should help me with creating better entries on the fossils I try to identify.

The next book is Index Fossils of North America by Hervey W. Shimer and Robert R. Shrock from MIT Press. This book is nice though dated (1944). It has a lot of images to study and compare to specimens.
The last book is one I became familiar with in the Indiana University Southeast library while I was a student there. It is Memoir 93 Silurian and Devonian Corals of the Falls of the Ohio by Erwin C. Stumm, The Geological Society of America. Most of the fossils I find in Jefferson County near the Ohio River and over in southern Indiana tend to be corals. This book is a great asset to help with the study of those corals. The book I recently purchased was in excellent condition as if it was never used since it was published in 1964.



Other resources are Dry Dredgers website for Ordovician fossils, Kentucky Paleontological Society (KPS) website for Kentucky fossils and older books whose copyrights have expired. Another good reference to consult is the JSTOR database at the library for journal papers. It is a great research tool for showing how papers reference other research and how they are in turn referenced by later works.

Halysites louisvillensis Chain Coral Fossil

The index fossil of the Silurian period: Halysites. These coral fragments were found in the Louisville limestone in Jefferson County, Kentucky. Erwin Stumm's book Silurian and Devonian Corals of the Falls of the Ohio lists four types of Halysites and this one seems to be Halysites louisvillensis (Stumm, 1964).