Silurian Coral Catenipora from Gotland

Description

Good quality fossil Silurian Coral Catenipora from Gotland / Sweden for sale. The coral fossil is about 10 cm or 4 inches in diameter. The hight is about 9 cm or 3.5 inches. The exoscelletton or theca of the polyps are well preserved and show a lot of details. Inside the thecae many septa are preserved and can be seen more with a magnifiing glass.

Corals like Catenipora are also called Chain corals due to the chainlike arrangement of the exoscelletton or thecae of the polyps.

I am not an expert in corals but Catenipora is often mistaken for Halysites. The two species Catenipora and Halysites occur together in the same layers of the Silurian in Sweden and probably elsewhere. And they look alike. In fact I hesitated for 3 years to post any of these corals. I was so focussed on Catenipora beeing Halysites due to first appearance matched in pictures and mainly the often occurence in the Swedisch Silurian, but also noticed some dismatch. I had to go back to my old books and chew it up again.

According to the great book from Arno Hermann Mueller “Lehrbuch der Palaeozoologie” (1980), Catenipora has same sized polyps that build the chain. Halysites has smaller miniture polyps in between the larger polyps of the chain. Catenipora shows septae, while Halysites trends to luck them. It is also backed by the newer “Fossilien Enzyklopaedie” from Ivanow, Hrdolickova and Gregorova. It states here also that Catenipora is not so common, which is the opposite in Sweden.

The Catenipora Coral here comes from the remote Island of Gotland. In books and on the internet The name Catenipoa escharoides is shown with corals of the genus Catenipora. Catenipora escharoides belongs more to the lower Llandovery. The layers exposed at the location here are very late LLandovery ( 2 to 4 m )  to Wenlock. Therefore and by appearance it would be probably Catenipora elegans, that looks still very similar to Catenipora escharoides sold here.

Some information regarding the fossil Coral Catenipora from Sweden can be found here:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1871174X23000872

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