Thursday, November 27, 2014

Leptestia sp. brachiopod & Cryptocrinites sp. cystoid from St. Petersburg

I'm always on the lookout for new brachiopods for my collection and this Strophomenid type caught my eye when posted on E-bay. It's from the Ordovician aged rocks near St. Petersburg in Russia. The seller had it identified as "Leptepsia sp." but as I had never heard of that genus I did some digging on Google. What I came up with was a paper written in 1969 by T.N. Alihova. Unfortunately it's mostly written in Russian (cyrillic alphabet) so I can't easily translate it but the names of the genera and species are in the latin alphabet.

The title of the paper is "СТРАТИГРАФИЯ И БРАХИОПОДЫ СРЕДНЕОРДОВИКСКИХ ОТЛОЖЕНИЙ МОСКОВСОЙ СИНЕКЛИЗЫ" which translates roughly (via Google Translate) to "Stratigraphy and Brachiopods of the Ordovician Deposits of the Moscow Syncline".

So, in summary, I believe this is Leptestia sp. from the Aseri stage, Middle Ordovician, Vilpovitsy Quarry, St Petersburg.







Oh, and there is a cystoid on the piece as well that was labelled as "Cyclocrinus sp." which I find suspect as well. A little looking around on the website Fossiilid.info gave me a possible match in Hemicosmites sp.. Update 5/14/15 - Thanks to the comments on this post I now believe this to be Cryptocrinites sp.






6 comments:

  1. Nice! But I don`t see pores on this echinoderm. Maybe it`s Cryptocrinites?

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    1. Could be... I'll have to look into that some more.

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  2. This is Cryptocrinites (Eocrinoidea) for sure.
    http://books.google.hr/books?hl=ru&lr=&id=yrmgZtjBwvAC&oi=fnd&pg=PA173&dq=Comparative+morphology+of+Rhipidocystis+Jaekel,+1900+and+Cryptocrinites+von+Buch,+1840&ots=6WOngJ43YP&sig=KOiINoLxFNzJpxXvMH0kFrA_VzA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

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    1. Thank you for the reply Nickolay. The link you posted is not available for me but I will keep a look out for the paper you were referencing.

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    2. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxx1grKgKILHTGNVeHZfNk9sQms/view?usp=sharing
      https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxx1grKgKILHd3JqcUZGTHN5N00/view?usp=sharing
      https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxx1grKgKILHMWVMWWsxMnBfOXc/view?usp=sharing

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    3. Thank you very much Nickolay!

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