I have had an active interest in mineral collecting for several decades (five years in Arizona can do that to anyone), but have developed a growing interest in fossils since moving to western New York two years ago.  Having completed my first full season of mucking up creeks and stopping at roadcuts in the Silurian and Devonian strata of western New York I can announce that I now have a favorite fossil.

I realize many are, and for very good reason, enamored with trilobites.  Be they DiPleura, Greenops, Dalmanites, or Eldredgeops , those are certainly great finds and I will be more than happy to pick one up when I come upon it.  But I took a fancy to a simple tabulate coral species this summer:  Pleurodictyum americanum, a species first described by the German paleontologist Carl Ferdinand von Roemer in the late 19^th century.  Note his original drawings in the featured image for this post (Roemer, 1876).

Perhaps it is the near perfect symmetry of the colonial coral that grabbed my eye.  With a rounded top and a fairly flat bottom they certainly look grand once clay and shale is washed from the polygonal corallites covering the surface.   Even better presentation results when multiple specimens of variable size are displayed together.  My interest was also sparked because “pleuros”, as I have come to affectionately call them, are not as common as horn coral or many of the brachiopods species that are ubiquitous at many sites in the Finger Lakes region, but they are also far from rare and when found they are typically complete and recoverable.

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