Authors: M. K. Elias and G.E. Condra
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This is the first part of a report on the King and King collection of Permian bryozoans made in Glass Mountains of Texas. The collection was stored in the Peabody Museum at Yale University and forwarded by Dr. Carl O. Dunbar to Condra for study and description. Condra also collected specimens from the area worked by the King brothers as did Dr. Charles Schuchert of Yale University. Etched bryozoans from this source were forwarded to us by Dunbar, but they are mostly specimens of bryozoans other than Fenesiella. The fistuliporoids of the collections, turned over to Dr. Raymond C. Moore of the Kansas Geological Survey for investigation and description, were described in part by Moore and Dudley (1944). Some progress was made in the study of the main part of the collection, but soon it was decided that intensive study should be made of certain genera, as with Fenestella, Polypora, Thamniscus, and others, and that each field of investigation should be expanded to include the description and comparison of related species obtained from formations of correlative age in other areas and regions. This change in procedure resulted in the present report on the Fenestella. The rest of the Glass Mountains collections is to be described later, some genera by the Kansas Geological Survey, and others by the Nebraska Survey. Some late Pennsylvanian species of Fenestella described by Condra (1903) from Nebraska and from northern Texas by Moore (1929) are here revised and compared with the related Permian forms from the Glass Mountains and from Russia. We also described a few new species collected in Russia by Condra in 1937. The types of these species are in the collection of Carboniferous and Permian fossils he brought from Russia. Lists of the species of Fenestella in the Russian collection are supplemented. The lifelong studies by Borg on living Cyclostomata have been utilized in a new approach toward understanding of microstructure of Fenestella, and technique was improved by study of thinnest possible thin sections under polarized light. One of the results was the discovery in Fenestella and other fenestrate Cryptostomata of a structural equivalent to the common bud or colonial bud (Smitt, 1866; Borg, 1926; 1933) in Cyclostomata, here named colonial plexus. This means repudiation of Shulga-Nesterenko's theory of a "capillary system" in these same fenestrate forms, because her "system" is actually made of two unrelated elements: dorsal part of the colonial plexus originating primarily and the spicules ("capillaries") originating secondarily.
Published: 11/10/1957
ISBN Number: 0-8137-1070-7
Pages: 158
Product Category: Memoirs