An enigmatic encruster from the Upper Ordovician rocky shore exposed near Churchill, Manitoba, was recently described by Johnson et al. (1998). The specimen was found attached to a quartzite boulder enclosed in carbonate matrix. The matlike, calcareous fossil consists of densely packed, vertical, cylindrical columns with upward-radiating structures issuing from their centers. It was identified as a new genus and species, Storeacolumnella hudsonensis, of uncertain taxonomic affinity but with possible characteristics of sponges and calcareous green algae. In particular, the radiating structures within columns were compared with spicules of a sclerosponge and with the siphon system of siphonous green algae.

Trilobites from the Missisquoia Zone and the Symphysurina brevispicata Subzone of the Symphysurina Zone (Ibexian Series, lowest Ordovician) were collected from measured sections in the uppermost Deadwood Formation in the Black Hills of South Dakota and Bear Lodge Mountains in northeasternmost Wyoming. These collections were made by Christina Lochman-Balk and her students, and turned over to the author to complete the project. They are compared with previous reported occurrences of this fauna from this area. No trilobites from the underlying Sunwaptan Stage (Upper Cambrian) occur with the lowest Ordovician trilobites, suggesting that the sharp faunal extinction at the base of the Ordovician (North American sense = Eurekia apopsis Zone, Ibexian Series) occurred in the Deadwood Formation as it did over all of the North American continent.

Sun and Boucot (1999) described the ontogenetic development of several important morphologic structures in Stringocephalus gubiensis, which occurs in the late Eifelian kockelianus Zone of South China. They found that in small specimens ranging from 5 to 18 mm in width the cardinal process forms a pair of discrete, rodlike lobes (Sun and Boucot, 1999, Figs. 1.1–1.6, 2.1–2.6). In specimens generally exceeding 20 mm in width, these lobes fuse to form the single, long, terminally bifid, stalklike cardinal process characteristic of Stringocephalus.

Calyptraea antiqua Howse (1848, 1858), based upon a plate from the Permian of England, was included in the Polyplacophora. King (1850) questioned this assignment since Calyptraea is a gastropod. Kirkby (1859) placed C. antiquus (Howse) in the genus Chitonellus Lamarck, 1819 and described two new species from the Permian of England, C. hancockianus and C. distortus. Kirkby and Young (1867) described another taxon, C. subantiquus, from the Carboniferous of Scotland. Branson (1948) questioned the assignment of these species to the Polyplacophora. Smith and Hoare (1987) rejected them from the class. Kirkby also included other specimens in Chitonellus; these are now assigned to the polyplacophoran Glyptochiton deKoninck, 1883. Geinitz (1861) followed the assignment of Kirkby and recognized three species using Kirkby's (1859) illustrations.

Newly discovered benthic fossils and specimens illustrated in the paleontological literature indicate that drilling predators (or parasites) were present in the Permian. New field data from southern Brazil document the first drill holes ever reported for Permian bivalve mollusks. In addition, a literature review revealed drill holes in shells of articulate brachiopods from Russia, Greece, and West Texas. Holes range in size from 0.1 to 5.8 mm and are typically round, cylindrical, singular penetrations perpendicular to the valve surface. Incomplete, healed, and multiple holes are absent. Drilling frequency, a proxy for predation intensity, is very low: less than 1 percent (this estimate may be seriously affected by taphonomic and monographic biases). Literature data suggest that frequency of drilled specimens varied significantly among higher brachiopod taxa. The geography and stratigraphy of drilled specimens indicate that drilling organisms were worldwide in their occurrence and continuously present in marine ecosystems throughout the Permian. This report is consistent with other recent studies indicating that although drillers were continuously present throughout the Phanerozoic, drilling intensity was lower in the Late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic.

Baesemann (1973) erected the genus Aethotaxis to accommodate morphologically distinctive conodont elements from the Pennsylvanian (Missourian) of northeastern Kansas. By chance we have recently discovered that the name is preoccupied by a notothenioid perciform fish Aethotaxis DeWitt, 1962. Thus, in accordance with Article 60 of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (1999), we propose the name Ubinates nomen novum as a replacement for Aethotaxis Baesemann, 1973, not Aethotaxis DeWitt, 1962. Ubinates derives from the Latin ubi, meaning where (interrogative), and nates, meaning rump; this refers to the fact that it is not known which, if any, of the elements presently assigned to species of Ubinates occupied the posterior positions in the apparatus. The type species of Ubinates is U. advena by original designation (Baesemann, 1973).

The early Cambrian Chengjiang Lagerstatte, generally regarded as late Atdabanian (Qian and Bengtson, 1989; Bengtson et al., 1990), has become celebrated for perhaps the earliest biota of soft-bodied organisms known from the fossil record and has proven to be critical to our understanding of early metazoan evolution. The Sirius Passet fauna from Peary Land, North Greenland, another important repository of soft-bodied and poorly sclerotized fossils, was also claimed as Early Cambrian (Conway Morris et al., 1987; Budd, 1995). The exact stratigraphic position of the Sirius Passet fauna (Buen Formation) is still uncertain, although the possibility of late Atdabanian age was proposed (Vidal and Peel, 1993). Recent work dates it in the “Nevadella” Biozone (Budd and Peel, 1998). It therefore appears to be simultaneous with or perhaps slightly younger than Chengjiang Lagerstatte, Eoredlichia Biozone (Zhuravlev, 1995). The Emu Bay Shale of Kangaroo Island, South Australia, has long been famous as a source of magnificent specimens of the trilobites Redlichia takooensis and Hsunaspis bilobata. It is additionally important as the only site in Australia so far to yield a Burgess-Shale-type biota (Glaessner, 1979; Nedin, 1992). The Emu Bay Shale was considered late Early Cambrian in age (Daily, 1956; Öpik, 1975). But Zhang et al.(1980) reassessed its age based on data from the Chinese Early Cambrian. The occurrence of Redlichia takooensis and closely related species of Hsunaspis indicates an equivalence to the Tsanglangpuian in the Chinese sequence, and the contemporary South Australia fauna correlate with the Botomian of Siberia (Bengtson et al., 1990). Thus the Emu Bay Shale is younger than the upper Atdabanian Chengjiang Lagerstatte, Chiungchussuian.

This finding of Pseudomulceodens in Mississippian-age rocks of the Santiago Formation provides the first evidence of the molluscan class Rostroconchia in Mexico. Elsewhere in North American Mississippian rocks the class occurs in Arkansas (Hoare et al., 1982, 1988); Illinois (Weller, 1916); Indiana (Beede, 1906); Iowa (White and Whitfield, 1862); Michigan (Winchell, 1870); Montana and Nevada (Pojeta and Runnegar, 1976); Ohio (Hyde, 1953; Hoare, 1990); and Oklahoma (Branson, 1958).

Fossil vertebrates have been described from the Paleocene of Big Bend National Park, Brewster County, Texas, by Wilson et al. (1952), Wilson (1967), Schiebout (1973, 1974), and Standhardt (1986). These studies focused on the mammalian component of the fauna, although crocodylian and chelonian remains are known. Schiebout (1973) referred a partial dentary to Diplocynodon. Teeth in the Black Peaks Formation were referred to Allognathosuchus by Straight (1996); Standardt (1986) discussed isolated crocodyliform teeth from across the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary in this area, but did not assign any of them to named taxa. Brochu (1996) briefly reviewed more complete remains, which were found to include an alligatorid and a member of Borealosuchus. The giant crocodylian Deinosuchus and a goniopholidid are known from underlying Cretaceous sediments (Rowe et al., 1992), and overlying Eocene units are known to preserve remains of the ziphodont taxon Pristichampsus (Busbey, 1986).

A newly discovered Helicoprion specimen from the Patlanoaya Formation, State of Puebla, represents the southernmost finding of this genus of edestoid-shark in the Western Hemisphere. It was found in sediments assigned to the upper part of the Early Permian, based on its association with Perrinites hilli, an index ammonoid for the Leonardian age.

In a series of papers on Paleozoic stratigraphy and paleontology in southern Mexico, Buitrón and colleagues (Buitrón, 1977; Velasco De León and Buitrón, 1992; Buitrón et al., 1987; Villaseñor et al., 1987; and Esquivel-Macías, 1996) utilized the crinoid pluricolumnal taxonomy of Moore and Jeffords (1968) to help establish a Pennsylvanian age for the lower Santa Rosa Formation, the del Monte Formation, and the upper Patlanoaya Formation. Since 1968, crinoid pluricolumnal taxonomy and the biostratigraphic utility of pluricolumnals has received very little attention in North America. Whereas the biological classification of crinoids is vested primarily in attributes of the crown, these papers illustrated the biostratigraphic utility of crinoid columnals and pluricolumnals where crinoid crowns are not recovered. Indeed, this was the intent of R. C. Moore, when he embarked on his studies of columnals and pluricolumnals (Moore et al., 1968; Moore and Jeffords, 1968; and Jeffords and Miller, 1968).

On Friday September 17 Jim Stitt died quietly in his sleep, ending a long and characteristically tenacious battle with cancer. His passing leaves a void of great magnitude in the geological sciences and in the lives of the many people whom he influenced as family, friends, or colleagues. I was Jim's first Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, where he spent the past 31 years as a pillar of the geology program, serving at various times as Chair and Graduate Student Advisor. Jim is well known and respected for an impressive body of meticulously crafted taxonomic and biostratigraphic studies on trilobites and brachiopods. His three monographs on faunas in the Arbuckle and Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma (Stitt, 1971a, 1977, 1983) established that area as a standard for correlation of Upper Cambrian and Lower Ordovician strata in North America. This “Oklahoma trilogy” is a treasure trove of taxonomic and biostratigraphic data that has been drawn upon heavily in numerous subsequent biostratigraphic and paleobiologic studies. It provides a biozonation of unparalleled precision for carbonate platform facies of that interval, ironically assembled in an area where rocks of that age yield their fossils only reluctantly. Jim took great pride in extracting useful information from difficult rocks. He passed that laudable attitude on to his academic offspring, along with the sense of satisfaction he derived from seeing his data put to good use in solving geologic or paleobiologic problems, in his own work and in that of others. At the same time, he was always complimentary and supportive of more theoretical or abstract research, an attitude sadly lacking in some practitioners with a bent toward applied paleontology.

Although pareiasaurs are one of the most abundant and conspicuous elements of Late Permian terrestrial ecosystems, small individuals of these reptiles (either small species or juveniles of large species) are extremely rare. Until now, the smallest known pareiasaur is the type of the late, heavily armored form Anthodon (=Nanoparia) pricei (Bernard Price Institute of Palaeontological Research, Johannesburg 1/6), with a skull length of 10 cm and an inferred snout-vent length of approximately 50 cm. This is presumably an adult of a dwarf form, since all elements of the skull and postcranial skeleton are fully ossified, sutures are closed, and the dermal armor is more highly developed than in any other pareiasaur (Broom and Robinson, 1948; Brink, 1955; Findlay, 1970; Lee, 1997). A second and as yet undescribed specimen (Geological Survey, Pretoria CM86/544) is approximately the same size, being only very slightly larger (Lee, 1997). No other specimens of this taxon are known. An unnumbered humerus in the Amalitsky collection of the Palaeontological Institute, Moscow, is from a pareiasaur of similar size to the second specimen of A. pricei. However, this specimen is presumably a juvenile of a large form: the ends of the humerus are unossified, and the specimen comes from the North Dvina bone beds, which have yielded numerous specimens of the large pareiasaur Scutosaurus but no other pareiasaur taxon. Here, we re-evaluate a specimen originally described as a dicynodont tail, and later as a procolophonoid, and demonstrate that it is actually a juvenile of the pareiasaur Elginia mirabilis. It is also by far the smallest pareiasaur so far known, being approximately half the dimensions of the next smallest individual, the type specimen of Anthodon pricei. The newly recognized specimen provides new information on the ontogeny of pareiasaurs and the homology of some problematic skull elements.