Hello Dorte,
Good to hear from you again and congratulations on your marriage! I will
accept your kind offer. I cannot read German that well but I have a very
good translation program I use on the Internet and a German English teacher
who lives in northern Germany who will translate technical material for me.
In my undergraduate work I did an Honors Program on the faunal range in the
exact same area you visited and know of many sponge sites.
The particular locality the new specimens came from is just outside of
Bridgeport, Wise County, Texas at one of the Pioneer Aggregate quarries.
There is a natural slump on one of the hills on the property with an outcrop
of a sponge garden. The same unit outcrops less than .5 kilometers away on
the upper edge of the Lake Bridgeport Spillway with the same fauna, minus
three genera of the sponges. At the quarry locality there are over ten
species of fossil sponges found. One of the unidentified species is a large
vase sponge that I had sent you photos of a long time back when I first
found it. All of the other sponges found by Girty and King I have found and
identified as well from the Texas outcrops.
I have not collected the Permian fauna to west but do have access to some of
the Glass Mountain rock and have started acid etching it. With luck there
will be some sponge material, or at least spicules. This spring I will be
going to the Big Bend Country and the El Paso, Texas area to collect a
Cretaceous site a friend has located that is producing a fauna very similar
to the Hover quarries in Germany.
Take care,
Jim Wyatt
1517 Greentree Lane
Garland, Texas 75042
[log in to unmask]
http://www.fossilnet.com
----- Original Message -----
From: Dorte Janussen <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2001 6:28 AM
Subject: Re: Dictyida
> Hello Jim Wyatt,
> Girty and King described mainly calcareous Wewokellid sponges. The
localities of
> Pennsylvanian age in Texas deliver very rich associations of these
sponges, and
> I visited some of them together with Ron Johns (Austin Community College)
and
> also studied the type collection at the Texan Museum. We made good
collections
> and wanted to work on them taxonomically, but so far neigther Ron nor I
ever
> found the time. Some observations of characters of these sponges are
described
> in my habilitation thesis of 1999, which may be usefull if you want to do
a
> cladistic analysis of the Pennsylvanian from Texas. So if you are
interested and
> can read German, I can send you the thesis by snail mail.
> With best regards
> Dorte Janussen
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