Platystrophia ponderosa Brachiopod

Sand abrasion cleaning on Ordovician Period brachiopods. Recently, I have been preparing to send some fossils to a friend and decided to clean some of the Platystrophia ponderosa? ones. This is Kentucky's state fossil so it seemed appropriate. If the matrix is soft the cleaning process has great results.

These fossils were found at roadcuts east of Louisville, Kentucky.

Here are some pictures of some of the ones that showed marked improvement. One most of the matrix was off this first brachiopod it revealed some more fossils. I made one mistake in this process, I forgot to take before pictures so a visual comparison could be made. Luckily, I have taken some pictures of other fossils types to show in future posts.

The green arrows show the locations of several very small Cornulites worm tubes attached in the shell ridges.

Eridophyllum Colonial Coral

Wow, this coral is about 30 cm wide. My cousin found this recently at a work site luckily before a piece of heavy machinery crushed it. It appears to be a Devonian Period Eridophyllum from the Jeffersonville Limestone. It appears to have some bryozoan colonies growing on top of it.

The coral fossil was found in Louisville, Kentucky.

Modern Day Crinoid

Yesterday, I got to tour the Indiana University Southeast Geosciences Department. Toward the end of our tour, we went into one of the labs and one the shelf was a jar with a clear preservative. In the jar was this white crinoid which were told was found in about 400 feet of water off the coast of Florida. It was interesting to see a creature that usually is only found as fossil.

Some of the images are not too clear since I had low lighting and was taking pictures through a jar filled with liquid.

(UPDATED: 09/12/2010)
Here are pictures of a modern day sea lily/crinoid (Metacrinus rotundus) of the phylum Echinodermata.  Pictures taken in August 2010 at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

I include some pictures for Mississippian Period (Lower Carboniferous) crinoid stems from the Fort Payne Formation located at Lake Cumberland, Kentucky.