GeologyRocks

Hi Lucy,

Welcome to GR! Could you give us some idea of scale please?

The "Top" shot (first picture) looks pretty formless to me, it may well have been overgrown by encrusting Bryozoans or coraline algae if it died sometime prior to the fossilisation process.

The "Bottom/Flat" shot (second picture) certainly shows radial structures, the largest just left of centre, and perhaps a couple of smaller ones to the left of it. The right-hand side looks pretty amorphous to me...

I'm uncertain whether the radial structures are the septae of individual calices - in which case they seem quite large and put me more in mind of Rugose rather than Tabulate corals but it's difficult to make my mind up without a scale - or are some larger structural feature...

Either way I think identifying it to species level is going to be a tall order. If I were you, I'd be ecstatic if I could pin it down to a single Genus.

I'm sure others will chip-in a bit later and blow my suppositions out of the water, but I hope this helps in some way!

Regards,

Ben. 

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your suggestions. I'd be happy with identifying to genus level and this stage - the main thing I want to do is to distinguish growth direction.  

The  whole rock is 21cm long, 13cm wide and has a depth of 7cm. The slab has been cut to a length of 16.5cm and a width of  6cm. The radial structure is around 5cm. 

 Thanks, 

Lucy 

... making a post at "The Fossil Forum". I am not much on the more recent stuff, but there are some Cenozoic geeks that hang out on the site.

This probably isn't going to help but, wow I thought I had it bad when I tried to identify my coral from Aliaga for my thesis.  My advice would be to read all of the literature you have available for that area and see what names for coral come up, that's unfortunatly what I had to do. 

Good Luck

Leah