Turritella Gastropod of Alabama

About 60 million years ago (or so) during the Paleocene epoch, a towering coiled shell sea gastropod roamed a shallow sea that is now where southern Alabama is in the United States.  Fast forward to the early 1800s, Timothy Abbott Conrad from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia spends years studying the shell fossils of Monroe County, Alabama.  His studies result in a book Fossil Shells of the Tertiary Formations of North America which a reproduction of can be found at Google Books website.



The fossil pictures in this post were found in the Gosport Sand or Lisbon Formation of the Paleocene Epoch/Eocene Period. The location was Monroe County, Alabama, USA. This gastropod fossils might be the Turritella mortoni?.  Thanks to Pam and Herb for these fossils. 

Close up of spiral point.

The Inner Atrypa

Above is a diagram of a North African Atrypa reticularis from the Middle Devonian Period.  It is on display at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, France.

This next image is of both sides of a Pseudoatrypa found in the Jeffersonville Limestone of Clark County, Indiana. 

This last picture is another example of the Pseudoatrypa from the same locality though in a little rougher shape.

SEM of Cornulites

In early March 2010 I sent a number of samples to ASPEX Corporation to be imaged with a Personal Scanning Electron Microscope (PSEM).  It was part of their free scanning promotion talked about in this February 26, 2010 post. One item sent was Cornulites tube from the Ordovician Period.  The fossil was found in the Kope Formation of Carroll County, Kentucky.  Yesterday, I received the results which I now present in this posting.

Binyam of ASPEX Corporation was the analyst and report preparer. He used the PSEM eXplorer (image below) to analyze this fossil (above).  A manual SEM and EDX Analysis was done using Backscatter electron detector (BSED) to collect images under variable pressure conditions (0.15 Torr) and 20 KeV. 

Here is a SEM image with 200 um scale of the area between multiple growth rings.

A even more close up view provided by this image at 100 um scale.  Yikes, I need to clean these fossils better!

Thanks to ASPEX for doing this analysis and imaging!  Visit this weblink for more information about their promotion.