Author Archives: Mark Wilson

About Mark Wilson

Mark Wilson is an emeritus Professor of Geology at The College of Wooster. He specializes in invertebrate paleontology, carbonate sedimentology, and stratigraphy. He also is an expert on pseudoscience, especially creationism.

Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A bitten brachiopod (Upper Ordovician of southeastern Indiana)

Mark Wilson February 4, 2016

This brachiopod, identified as Glyptorthis insculpta (Hall, 1847), was shared with me by its collector, Diane from New York State. She found it in a muddy horizon of the Bull Fork Formation (Upper Ordovician) in southeastern Indiana. She immediately noted … Continue reading →
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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A brachiopod with a heavy burden (Upper Ordovician of southeastern Indiana)

Mark Wilson January 28, 2016

Yes, the above image doesn’t look much like a brachiopod, but just wait. We see a trepostome bryozoan with extended knobs and a few borings. Flip it over, though … … and we see that the bryozoan almost entirely covers … Continue reading →
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Wooster’s Fossils of the Week: Gastropod opercula from the Pliocene of Cyprus

Mark Wilson January 21, 2016

This week’s brief entry (it is short because we’re in the first few days of a new semester at Wooster) is related to last week’s post. Above are two gastropod opercula from the Nicosia Formation (Pliocene) of Cyprus. They were … Continue reading →
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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A turbinid gastropod from the Pliocene of Cyprus

Mark Wilson January 14, 2016

We saw this broken gastropod from the Pliocene of Cyprus in this blog post about two and a half years ago. I recently rediscovered it while sorting specimens and decided to show this intriguing perspective through the broken part of … Continue reading →
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Update from Classifying the Unknown: the Lunar Edition

Mark Wilson January 9, 2016

[Guest Blogger: Annette Hilton (’17)] This past summer I had the privilege of working as an intern in the Earth and Planetary Sciences department at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) — please see my previous blog post. Since … Continue reading →
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Wooster’s Fossils of the Week: Atrypid brachiopods attached to a trepostome bryozoan from the Upper Ordovician of southern Indiana

Mark Wilson January 7, 2016

This is a follow-up post to our entry on Christmas Day two weeks ago. Above is a trepostome bryozoan (the long porous piece) with specimens of the atrypid brachiopod Zygospira modesta clustered around it. They are positioned with their ventral … Continue reading →
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Five-Year Anniversary Edition of Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A tabulate coral from the Devonian of northwestern Ohio

Mark Wilson December 31, 2015

This post of Wooster’s Fossil of the Week marks five years of this feature. If you’re counting, that is 260 entries, with never a week missed. To celebrate, I’m returning to the very first fossil in the series, a beautiful … Continue reading →
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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: Tiny atrypid brachiopods from the Upper Ordovician of southern Ohio

Mark Wilson December 24, 2015

These exquisite little brachiopods are among the most abundant fossils in the Upper Ordovician of the Cincinnati area. My Invertebrate Paleontology students collected dozens of them from the Waynesville Formation on our field trip to Caesar Creek Lake last semester. … Continue reading →
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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A tabulate coral from the Upper Ordovician of southern Ohio

Mark Wilson December 17, 2015

We have here another fossil collected by a Wooster student on the August 2015 College of Wooster Invertebrate Paleontology field trip to Caesar Creek Lake, Ohio. Eduardo Luna picked up this specimen of the tabulate coral Calapoecia huronensis (Billings, 1865) … Continue reading →
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Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: A common trilobite from the Upper Ordovician of Ohio

Mark Wilson December 10, 2015

This beautiful specimen was collected by Wooster student Eve Caudill on this year’s College of Wooster Invertebrate Paleontology field trip to Caesar Creek Lake, Ohio. It is the iconic trilobite Flexicalymene meeki (Foerste, 1910) from a soft, “buttery” shale in … Continue reading →
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