By permission of the American Museum of Natural History
Fossil corals Coquina, Hippurite limestone
The limestones are full of fossils of corals. Indeed, there must have been reefs like those that skirt Florida to-day built by these lime-building polyps. Their forms are so well preserved in the rocks that it is possible to know just how they looked when they grew in the shallows.
One very common kind is called a cup coral, because the polyp formed a skeleton shaped like a cup. The body wall surrounded the skeleton, and the arms or tentacles rose from the centre of the funnel-like depression in the top. Little cups budded off from their parents, but remained attached, and at length the skeletons of all formed great masses of limy rock. Some cup corals grew in a solid mass, the new generation forming an outer layer, thus burying the parent cups.
A second type of corals in these oldest limestones is the honeycomb group. The colonies of polyps lived in tubes which lengthened gradually, forming compact, limy cylinders like organ pipes, fitted close together. The living generation always inhabited the upper chambers of the tubes. A third type is the chain coral, made of tubes joined in rows, single file like pickets of a fence. But these walls bend into curious patterns, so that the cross-section of a mass of them looks like a complex pattern of crochet-work, the irregular spaces fenced with chain stitches. Each open link is a pit in which a polyp lived.
Among the corals are sprays of a fine feathery growth embedded in the limestone. Fine, straight, splinter-like branches are saw-toothed on one or both edges. These limy fossils might not be seen at all, were they not bedded in shales, which are very fine-grained. Here again are the skeletons of animals. Each notch on each thread-like branch was the home of a tiny animal, not unlike a sea anemone and a coral polyp.
To believe this story it is necessary only to pick up a bit of dead shell or floating driftwood on which a feathery growth is found. These plumes, like "sea mosses," as they are called, are not plants at all, but colonies of polyps. Each one lived in a tiny pit, and these pits range one above the other, so as to look like notches on the thread-like divisions of the stem. Put a piece of this so-called "sea moss" in a glass of sea water, and in a few moments of quiet you will see, by the use of a magnifying glass, the spreading arms of the polyp thrust out of each pit.
The ancient seas swarmed with these living hydrozoans, and their remains are found preserved as fossils in the shales which once were beds of soft mud.
The hard shells of sea urchins and starfishes are made of lime. In the ancient seas, starfishes were rare and sea urchins did not exist, but all over the sea bottom grew creatures called crinoids, the soft parts of which were enclosed in limy protective cases and attached to rocks on the sea bottom by means of jointed stems. No fossils are more plentiful in the early limestones than these wonderful "stone lilies." Indeed, the crinoidal limestone seemed to be built of the skeletons of these animals. The lily-like body was flung open, as a lily opens its calyx, when the creature was feeding. But any alarm caused the tentacles to be drawn in, and the petal-like divisions of the body wall to close tightly together, till that wall looked like an unopened bud.
On the bottom of the Atlantic, near the Bahama Islands, these stone lilies are still found growing. Their jointed stems and body parts are as graceful in form and motion as any lily. The creature's mouth is in the centre of the flower-like top, and it feeds like the sea urchin, on particles obtained in the sea water.