Sample full of microfossils: foraminifera, ostracods, crinoids.

Tiny but curious fossils from Pennsylvanian deposits (Morrowan), Jefferson County, Oklahoma
Gene Autry Shale (314-318 million years old).
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Foraminifera are fascinating creatures. They are single-celled organisms, protysts, but they can be large enough to be visible without magnifying glass. For instance, the limestone used to build pyramids of Egypt contains many foraminifera shells from the genus Nummulites. They reach the size a coin and, actually often called “angel’s money”.
In search for smaller specimens of foraminifera, we sift through a sample from Gene Autry Shale in Jefferson county, Oklahoma, the land of artificial lakes, farms and hard-working people.
The fossils were deposited during Morrowan age of Carboniferous period, somewhere around 314 to 318 million years ago. The capsule contains a pinch of microfossil material with bits and pieces of marine organisms, and we will try to find something identifiable among them. You can probably recognize the disc-shaped plates from crinoid stalks - they look like wheels. We also have tiny gastropod shells in this sample. This white, flat and rounded shell belonged to foraminifera. Inside the shell, there are multiple chambers and those chambers may perform different functions, for instance, digestive or reproductive.
Such structure helps with the diffusion rate of the oxygen and other molecules enabling organism to grow larger, which would be more difficult in case of a spherical shape.
Here is another similar foraminifera shell.
And this looks like a plate with teeth, probably a conodont element. Spindle-like piece is a fragment of a crinoid. Each piece is no more than one millimeter long, by the way.
Here you go, a relatively large foraminifera with interesting shell made of several bulbous chambers. The species is Nodosinella glennensis. The shell used to be round but it got flattened under the weight of the sediment.
This piece looks like a tooth… may be. Here is a fossilized dropping made by a prehistoric shrimp. Similar greenish gray fecal pellets are often called glauconite pellets. Glauconite is iron potassium phyllo-silicate mineral sometimes used as fertilizer and sometimes called “green sand”. This mineral was also used as pigment for to make oil paints for medieval paintings. But you do not want to think about it next time you enjoy a work of art.
Some pieces are interesting and somewhat mysterious and that’s the beauty of hunting for fossils: you never know what you are going to find and you may even discover something totally new for sciences, something that nobody saw before.
Here is a fragile piece that looks like a shell of a bivalve mollusk but it’s an ostracod. Ostracods are tiny aquatic crustacean with carapaces consisting of two plates or valves. I like to compare them to mobile barnacles, which also crustaceans. Evolutionary speaking, ostracods are shrimp that decided to give up speed and instead build up the armor for protection. Small size helps to be inconspicuous. Both foraminifera and ostracods are excellent index fossils allowing geologists to assign the sediments to certain age or environmental conditions. Microfossils are convenient for this - they are numerous in quantity and variable in shape.
Ostracods are also called mussel shrimp or seed shrimp and there are several thousand of living species as well as over 10 000 extinct ostracod species. They can look quite bizarre and different species adapted various live styles - some feed on debris, some are predators or parasites on marine warms, sea urchins and even sharks.
Thanks for watching, do not forget to check out our videos about other microfossil samples and enjoy the rest of your day!
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