Caninia (coral)

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Caninia
Temporal range: Devonian to Permian 419.2–252.2  Ma
Caninia torquia coral KGS.jpg
Caninia torquia from the Beil Limestone Member, Lecompton Limestone, Douglas County, Kansas
Scientific classification Red Pencil Icon.png
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Cnidaria
Class: Anthozoa
Order: Rugosa
Family: Cyathopsidae
Genus: Caninia
Michelin 1840

Caninia is an extinct genus of rugose coral. [1] Its fossils occur worldwide from the Devonian to the Permian periods.

Contents

Paleoecology

It was marine in nature and known to live in lagoon-type ecosystems. [2] Because of the shallow water in which it lived, Caninia was often affected by processes above the water level, such as storms. [3]

Distribution

Place name formation Age
"Worldwide"Devonian [4]
Arkansas Fayetteville Shale, Pitkin Limestone Mississippian [5] [6]
Illinois Mississippian [6]
Oklahoma Fayetteville ShaleMississippian [6]
Montana Otter Formation Mississippian [7]
New Mexico Lake Valley Formation Mississippian [2]
Kansas Lecompton Limestone Pennsylvanian [8]
Nevada (Ely basin) Chainman Shale (Early) Pennsylvanian [9]
Texas Cisco Group Pennsylvanian [10]
Wales (South) Arundian Limestone, High Tor Limestone Carboniferous [3] [11]
Vancouver Island Buttle Lake Formation Permian [12]

Related Research Articles

The Carboniferous is a geologic period and system of the Paleozoic that spans 60 million years from the end of the Devonian Period 358.9 million years ago (Mya), to the beginning of the Permian Period, 298.9 Mya. The name Carboniferous means "coal-bearing", from the Latin carbō ("coal") and ferō, and refers to the many coal beds formed globally during that time.

Unconformity Rock surface indicating a gap in the geological record

An unconformity is a buried erosional or non-depositional surface separating two rock masses or strata of different ages, indicating that sediment deposition was not continuous. In general, the older layer was exposed to erosion for an interval of time before deposition of the younger layer, but the term is used to describe any break in the sedimentary geologic record. The significance of angular unconformity was shown by James Hutton, who found examples of Hutton's Unconformity at Jedburgh in 1787 and at Siccar Point in 1788.

The geology of Illinois includes extensive deposits of marine sedimentary rocks from the Palaeozoic, as well as relatively minor contributions from the Mesozoic and Cenozoic. Ice age glaciation left a wealth of glacial topographic features throughout the state.

Fayetteville Shale

The Fayetteville Shale is a geologic formation of Mississippian age composed of tight shale within the Arkoma Basin of Arkansas and Oklahoma. It is named for the city of Fayetteville, Arkansas, and requires hydraulic fracturing to release the natural gas contained within.

Red Beds of Texas and Oklahoma

The Red Beds of Texas and Oklahoma are a group of Early Permian-age geologic strata in the southwestern United States cropping out in north-central Texas and south-central Oklahoma. They comprise several stratigraphic groups including the Clear Fork Group, the Wichita Group, and the Pease River Group. The Red Beds were first explored by American paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope starting in 1877. Fossil remains of many Permian tetrapods have been found in the Red Beds, including those of Dimetrodon, Edaphosaurus, Seymouria, Platyhystrix, and Eryops. A recurring feature in many of these animals is the sail structure on their backs.

Paleontology in West Virginia

Paleontology in West Virginia refers to paleontological research occurring within or conducted by people from the U.S. state of West Virginia. West Virginia's fossil record begins in the Cambrian. From that time through the rest of the early Paleozoic, the state was at least partially submerged under a shallow sea. The Paleozoic seas of West Virginia were home to creatures like corals, eurypterids, graptolites, nautiloids, and trilobites at varying times. During the Carboniferous period, the sea was replaced by lushly vegetated coastal swamps. West Virginia is an excellent source of fossil plants due to these deposits. These swamps were home to amphibians. A gap in the local rock record spans from the Permian to the end of the Cenozoic. West Virginia was never the site of glacial activity during the Ice Age, but the state was home to creatures like mammoths, mastodons, and giant ground sloths. One local ground sloth, Megalonyx jeffersonii, was subject to the scholarly investigations of Thomas Jefferson, who misinterpreted the large-clawed remains as belonging to a lion-like predator. In 2008, this species was designated the West Virginia state fossil.

Paleontology in Alabama

Paleontology in Alabama refers to paleontological research occurring within or conducted by people from the U.S. state of Alabama. Pennsylvanian plant fossils are common, especially around coal mines. During the early Paleozoic, Alabama was at least partially covered by a sea that would end up being home to creatures including brachiopods, bryozoans, corals, and graptolites. During the Devonian the local seas deepened and local wildlife became scarce due to their decreasing oxygen levels.

Paleontology in Texas

Paleontology in Texas refers to paleontological research occurring within or conducted by people from the U.S. state of Texas. Author Marian Murray has remarked that "Texas is as big for fossils as it is for everything else." Some of the most important fossil finds in United States history have come from Texas. Fossils can be found throughout most of the state. The fossil record of Texas spans almost the entire geologic column from Precambrian to Pleistocene. Shark teeth are probably the state's most common fossil. During the early Paleozoic era Texas was covered by a sea that would later be home to creatures like brachiopods, cephalopods, graptolites, and trilobites. Little is known about the state's Devonian and early Carboniferous life. However, evidence indicates that during the late Carboniferous the state was home to marine life, land plants and early reptiles. During the Permian, the seas largely shrank away, but nevertheless coral reefs formed in the state. The rest of Texas was a coastal plain inhabited by early relatives of mammals like Dimetrodon and Edaphosaurus. During the Triassic, a great river system formed in the state that was inhabited by crocodile-like phytosaurs. Little is known about Jurassic Texas, but there are fossil aquatic invertebrates of this age like ammonites in the state. During the Early Cretaceous local large sauropods and theropods left a great abundance of footprints. Later in the Cretaceous, the state was covered by the Western Interior Seaway and home to creatures like mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, and few icthyosaurs. Early Cenozoic Texas still contained areas covered in seawater where invertebrates and sharks lived. On land the state would come to be home to creatures like glyptodonts, mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, titanotheres, uintatheres, and dire wolves. Archaeological evidence suggests that local Native Americans knew about local fossils. Formally trained scientists were already investigating the state's fossils by the late 1800s. In 1938, a major dinosaur footprint find occurred near Glen Rose. Pleurocoelus was the Texas state dinosaur from 1997 to 2009, when it was replaced by Paluxysaurus jonesi after the Texan fossils once referred to the former species were reclassified to a new genus.

Bluefield Formation

The Bluefield Formation is a geologic formation in West Virginia. It preserves fossils dating back to the Mississippian subperiod of the Carboniferous period. Sediments of this age formed along a large marine basin lying in the region of what is now the Appalachian Plateau. The Bluefield Formation is the lowest section of the primarily siliciclastic Mauch Chunk Group, underlying the Stony Gap Sandstone Member of the Hinton Formation and overlying the limestone-rich Greenbrier Group.

The Pitkin Formation, or Pitkin Limestone, is a fossiliferous geologic formation in northern Arkansas that dates to the Chesterian Series of the late Mississippian. This formation was first named the "Archimedes Limestone" by David Dale Owen in 1858, but was replaced in 1904. The Pitkin conformably overlies the Fayetteville Shale and unconformably underlies the Pennsylvanian-age Hale Formation. Some workers have considered the top of the Pitkin Formation to be a separate formation called the Imo Formation. However more recently, others have considered it as an informal member of the Pitkin Formation.

Stanton Formation

The Stanton Formation is a geologic formation of limestone in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri and Kansas. It preserves fossils dating back to the Carboniferous period. It is in the Upper Pennsylvanian series, forming the top of the Lansing Group.

San Andres Formation, United States

The San Andres Formation is a geologic formation found in New Mexico and Texas. It contains fossils characteristic of the late Leonardian (Kungurian) Age) of the Permian Period.

Bursum Formation

The Bursum Formation is a geologic formation in New Mexico. It preserves fossils dating back to the Early Permian period.

Berino Formation

The Berino Formation is a geologic formation in the Franklin Mountains of southern New Mexico and western Texas. It preserves fossils dating back to the middle Pennsylvanian.

Madera Group

The Madera Group is a group of geologic formations in northern New Mexico. Its fossil assemblage dates the formation to the middle to late Pennsylvanian period.

Coyote Butte Limestone

The Coyote Butte Limestone (OR085) is a geologic formation in Oregon. It preserves fossils dating back to the Sakmarian to Kungurian stages of the Permian period, spanning an estimated 23 million years. The formation occurs in isolated buttes to the north; Triangulation Hill, and south; type locality and name giver Coyote Butte and Tuckers Butte, on either side of the Grindstone and Twelvemile Creeks in Crook County, Oregon.

Val Verde Basin Foreland basin

The Val Verde Basin is a marginal foreland basin located in West Texas, just southeast of the Midland Basin. The Val Verde is a sub-basin of the larger Permian Basin and is roughly 24–40 km wide by 240 km long. It is an unconventional system and its sediments were deposited during a long period of flooding during the Middle to Late Cretaceous. This flooding event is referred to as the Western Interior Seaway, and many basins in the Western United States can attribute their oil and gas producing basins to carbonate deposition during this time period.

The geology of Ohio formed beginning more than one billion years ago in the Proterozoic eon of the Precambrian. The igneous and metamorphic crystalline basement rock is poorly understood except through deep boreholes and does not outcrop at the surface. The basement rock is divided between the Grenville Province and Superior Province. When the Grenville Province crust collided with Proto-North America, it launched the Grenville orogeny, a major mountain building event. The Grenville mountains eroded, filling in rift basins and Ohio was flooded and periodically exposed as dry land throughout the Paleozoic. In addition to marine carbonates such as limestone and dolomite, large deposits of shale and sandstone formed as subsequent mountain building events such as the Taconic orogeny and Acadian orogeny led to additional sediment deposition. Ohio transitioned to dryland conditions in the Pennsylvanian, forming large coal swamps and the region has been dryland ever since. Until the Pleistocene glaciations erased these features, the landscape was cut with deep stream valleys, which scoured away hundreds of meters of rock leaving little trace of geologic history in the Mesozoic and Cenozoic.

Fusselman Formation

The Fusselman Formation is a geologic formation in westernmost Texas and southern New Mexico. It preserves fossils dating back to the early Silurian period.

Victorio Peak Formation

The Victorio Peak Formation is a geologic formation found in the Delaware Basin in Texas and New Mexico. It preserves fossils dating back to the Leonardian Age of the Permian Period.

References

  1. "Fossil Corals". Archived from the original on 2012-06-14. Retrieved 2012-11-11.
  2. 1 2 Jeffords, Russel. 1943. Caninia from the Lower Carboniferous of New Mexico. Journal of Paleontology. vol. 17. no. 6.
  3. 1 2 Wu, Xian-tao. 1982. Storm-generated depositional types and associated trace fossils in Lower Carboniferous shallow-marine carbonates of Three Cliffs Bay and Ogmore-by-Sea, South Wales. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. vol.39. issue 3-4.
  4. Shimer and Shock. 1944. Index Fossils of North America. MIT Press. Boston. pg. 91.
  5. Easton, W.H. 1943. The Fauna of the Pitkin Formation of Arkansas. Journal of Paleontology: vol. 17. no. 2.
  6. 1 2 3 Easton, W.H. 1945. Amplexoid Corals from the Chester of Illinois and Arkansas. Journal of Paleontology: vol. 19. no. 6.
  7. Easton, W.H. 1945. Corals from the Otter Formation (Mississippian) of Montana. Journal of Paleontology: vol. 19. no. 5.
  8. "Kansas Geological Survey". Archived from the original on 2012-06-14. Retrieved 2012-11-11.
  9. Coogan, Alan. 1964. Early Pennsylvanian History of Ely Basin, Nevada. AAAPG Bulletin. vol. 48 no. 4.
  10. Waller, T.H. 1969. Lower Cisco Carbonate Deposition in North-Central Texas. A Guidebook to the Late Pennsylvanian Shelf Sediments, North-Central Texas. pp. 34-39.
  11. Beus, Stanly. Fossil Associations in the High Tor Limestone (Lower Carboniferous) of South Wales. Journal of Paleontology. vol. 58. no. 3.
  12. Ludvigsen, Rolf & Beard, Graham. 1997. West Coast Fossils: A Guide to the Ancient Life of Vancouver Island. pg. 67