Post by Joe Botting on Mar 21, 2006 17:52:33 GMT -5
Part of the beauty of ostracodes is the fact that they are so easily overlooked. This means there's always a good chance of finding more, even without having to go back out into the field and getting wet.
While waiting for Lucy to finish her coffee break (
) I was looking at the few slabs we picked up at a remote sandstone/chert locality in the Carneddau (a few miles north of Builth). One small slab had five different ostracodes on it, and I'm only confident that I've seen one of them before.
The new ones include a granulated Bullaeferum with a spectacular, striated velum (the flange around the edge) - not greatly different from some at the top of the murchisoni Zone, but rather nice and hopefully easily distinguishable. Then there's a gorgeous Gunnaropsis sp. nov. - the genus is only known from the Welsh area, but this is the first record from the inlier, and a new species to boot: delicate flanges everywhere. After that there are some more normal, smooth-ish binodicope-like things, one of which is almost entirely smooth but with a distinctly deep outline, and another has a very prominent sulcus. I don't think those two are yet on the list, although I may have stumbled across them elsewhere, and forgotten about them.
Not a bad day's work, though, really. One curious feature is the shallow-water environment (bryozoan-brachiopod-sponge assemblage), but we were already thinking, based on the bryozoans and brachiopods, that this was slightly further offshore than our other similar localities. We could be starting to see a very fine ecological zonation across the edges of the island, using several different groups in concert. At least, that's the hope. We'll have to wait and see.
If anyone's going out that way, we might pass on the grid reference and ask you to pick up a few more blocks! ;D
Joe
While waiting for Lucy to finish her coffee break (
) I was looking at the few slabs we picked up at a remote sandstone/chert locality in the Carneddau (a few miles north of Builth). One small slab had five different ostracodes on it, and I'm only confident that I've seen one of them before. The new ones include a granulated Bullaeferum with a spectacular, striated velum (the flange around the edge) - not greatly different from some at the top of the murchisoni Zone, but rather nice and hopefully easily distinguishable. Then there's a gorgeous Gunnaropsis sp. nov. - the genus is only known from the Welsh area, but this is the first record from the inlier, and a new species to boot: delicate flanges everywhere. After that there are some more normal, smooth-ish binodicope-like things, one of which is almost entirely smooth but with a distinctly deep outline, and another has a very prominent sulcus. I don't think those two are yet on the list, although I may have stumbled across them elsewhere, and forgotten about them.
Not a bad day's work, though, really. One curious feature is the shallow-water environment (bryozoan-brachiopod-sponge assemblage), but we were already thinking, based on the bryozoans and brachiopods, that this was slightly further offshore than our other similar localities. We could be starting to see a very fine ecological zonation across the edges of the island, using several different groups in concert. At least, that's the hope. We'll have to wait and see.
If anyone's going out that way, we might pass on the grid reference and ask you to pick up a few more blocks! ;D
Joe