The PaleozoicEra is the first of three geological eras of the Phanerozoic Eon. Beginning 538.8 million years ago (Ma), it succeeds the Neoproterozoic and ends 251.9 Ma at the start of the Mesozoic Era. The Paleozoic is subdivided into six geologic periods :
The Sipuncula or Sipunculida is a class containing about 162 species of unsegmented marine annelid worms. The name Sipuncula is from the genus name Sipunculus, and comes from the Latin siphunculus meaning a "small tube".
Conodonts are an extinct group of agnathan (jawless) vertebrates resembling eels, classified in the class Conodonta. For many years, they were known only from their tooth-like oral elements, which are usually found in isolation and are now called conodont elements. Knowledge about soft tissues remains limited. They existed in the world's oceans for over 300 million years, from the Cambrian to the beginning of the Jurassic. Conodont elements are widely used as index fossils, fossils used to define and identify geological periods. The animals are also called Conodontophora to avoid ambiguity.
Charles Lapworth FRS FGS was a headteacher and an English geologist who pioneered faunal analysis using index fossils and identified the Ordovician period.
A scolecodont is the jaw of a polychaete annelid, a common type of fossil-producing segmented worm useful in invertebrate paleontology. Scolecodonts are common and diverse microfossils, which range from the Cambrian period to the present. They diversified profusely in the Ordovician, and are most common in the Ordovician, Silurian and Devonian marine deposits of the Paleozoic era.
Choia is a genus of extinct demosponge ranging from the Cambrian until the Lower Ordovician periods. Fossils of Choia have been found in the Burgess Shale in British Columbia; the Maotianshan shales of China; the Wheeler Shale in Utah; and the Lower Ordovician Fezouata formation. It was first described in 1920 by Charles Doolittle Walcott.
Waterstonella grantonensis is a species of fossil crustacean so distinct from other crustaceans that it has been placed in its own genus, Waterstonella, family, Waterstonellidae, and order, Waterstonellidea. It is named after Charles Waterstone, keeper of geology at the Royal Scottish Museum, while the specific epithet commemorates the location where the fossil was found, the Granton shrimp beds, near Edinburgh.
Hamptonia is an extinct genus of sea sponge known from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale and the Lower Ordovician Fezouata formation. It was first described in 1920 by Charles Doolittle Walcott. 48 specimens of Hamptonia are known from the Greater Phyllopod bed, where they comprise < 0.1% of the community.
Louisella is a genus of worm known from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale. It was originally described by Charles Walcott in 1911 as a holothurian echinoderm, and represents a senior synonym of Miskoia, which was originally described as an annelid. 48 specimens of Louisella are known from the Greater Phyllopod bed, where they comprise < 0.1% of the community. It has been stated to have palaeoscolecid-like sclerites, though this is not in fact the case.
Pirania is an extinct genus of sea sponge known from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale and the Ordovician Fezouata formation. It is named after Mount St. Piran, a mountain situated in the Bow River Valley in Banff National Park, Alberta. It was first described in 1920 by Charles Doolittle Walcott. 198 specimens of Pirania are known from the Greater Phyllopod bed, where they comprise 0.38% of the community.
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.
This timeline of eurypterid research is a chronologically ordered list of important fossil discoveries, controversies of interpretation, and taxonomic revisions of eurypterids, a group of extinct aquatic arthropods closely related to modern arachnids and horseshoe crabs that lived during the Paleozoic Era.
The Granton Shrimp Bed is a fossil-bearing deposit exposed on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh, in Scotland. It is classified as a Konservat-Lagerstätten because of the exceptional quality of preservation of the fossils and is dominated by crustaceans; the deposit dates back to the Lower Carboniferous, some 359 to 323 million years ago.
The Waukesha Biota is an important fossil site located in Waukesha and Franklin, Milwaukee County within the state of Wisconsin. This biota is preserved in certain strata within the Brandon Bridge Formation, which dates to the early Silurian period. It is known for the exceptional preservation of soft-bodied organisms, including many species found nowhere else in rocks of similar age. The site's discovery was announced in 1985, leading to a plethora of discoveries. This biota is one of the few well studied Lagerstättes from the Silurian, making it important in our understanding of the period's biodiversity. Some of the species are not easily classified into known animal groups, showing that much research remains to be done on this site. Other taxa that are normally common in Silurian deposits are rare here, but trilobites are quite common.
Hallucigeniidae is a family of extinct worms belonging to the group Lobopodia that originated during the Cambrian explosion. It is based on the species Hallucigenia sparsa, the fossil of which was discovered by Charles Doolittle Walcott in 1911 from the Burgess Shale of British Columbia. The name Hallucigenia was created by Simon Conway Morris in 1977, from which the family was erected after discoveries of other hallucigeniid worms from other parts of the world. Classification of these lobopods and their retatives are still controversial, and the family consists of at least four genera.
Coalbrookdale Formation, earlier known as Wenlock Shale or Wenlock Shale Formation and also referred to as Herefordshire Lagerstätte in palaeontology, is a fossil-rich deposit (Konservat-Lagerstätte) in Powys and Herefordshire at the England–Wales border in UK. It belongs to the Wenlock Series of the Silurian Period within the Homerian Age. It is known for its well-preserved fossils of various invertebrate animals many of which are in their three-dimensional structures. Some of the fossils are regarded as earliest evidences and evolutionary origin of some of the major groups of modern animals.
Carbotubulus is a genus of extinct worm belonging to the group Lobopodia and known from the Carboniferous Carbondale Formation of the Mazon Creek area in Illinois, US. A monotypic genus, it contains one species Carbotubulus waloszeki. It was discovered and described by Joachim T. Haug, Georg Mayer, Carolin Haug, and Derek E.G. Briggs in 2012. With an age of about 300 million years, it is the first long-legged lobopodian discovered after the period of Cambrian explosion.
Sharat Kumar Roy was an American geologist of Indian origin. He took an interest in volcanoes and later was a specialist on meteorites. He worked as a curator of geology at the Chicago Natural History Museum and took part in several expeditions of the Museum. The US Geodetic Survey named a peak on Baffin Island after him as Mount Sharat in 1944.
2023 in arthropod paleontology is a list of new arthropod fossil taxa, including arachnids, crustaceans, trilobites, and other arthropods that were announced or described, as well as other significant arthropod paleontological discoveries and events which occurred in 2023.
