Please help! Is this sponge or coral?

[Pippa]

Please help me to identify these two fossils. 

When I picked up these rocks, I thought I had found corals, but now, looking at them from all sides, I'm stumped. 

What throws me, is that the pattern on each of the two fossils looks the same all around the rock. No vertical structure or growth pattern, anywhere. So even if these are just broken off pieces of a much larger fossil, corals still would show vertical structures on the sides, right? But no "sides" are visible here. Confusing.

Thanks so much in advance for taking the time to share your knowledge. 

 

#1:  Dimensions: width is 2.2cm; height is 3cm,  the individual circles vary quite a bit from <0.5mm to >1mm.

 

 

Detail:

 

 

#2:  I wouldn't mind if this one is geological, as I collect more purely geological rocks than I do fossils, but I don't think this one is just geological.

Dimensions: width: 3.5cm;  height: 2cm;  individual "dots": max 1mm

 

 

 

 

[supertramp]

The first piece seems to be oolitic limestone 

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=oolitic+limestone&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi17PLAqYroAhVCwAIHHUMbAjoQ_AUoAXoECBIQAw&biw=1366&bih=625#imgrc=Gm6iMvL2WZQSPM

 

ciao

 

[Pippa]

34 minutes ago, supertramp said:

The first piece seems to be oolitic limestone 

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=oolitic+limestone&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi17PLAqYroAhVCwAIHHUMbAjoQ_AUoAXoECBIQAw&biw=1366&bih=625#imgrc=Gm6iMvL2WZQSPM

 

ciao

 

Molte grazie, Supertramp! 

I should have recognized this, silly me!     I have a couple of jaspers / chalcedony with silicified oolites. Just never saw it directly on limestone from the beach... 

    

[Rockwood]

The second one could be a metamorphosed (marble) equivalent of the same. 

[Mark Kmiecik]

I bet they would really look good polished.

[Pippa]

20 hours ago, Rockwood said:

The second one could be a metamorphosed (marble) equivalent of the same. 

Really?  What makes you think so?

That rock (the 2nd one) neither looks nor feels like marble to me.  At all.  At least not any marble I've ever seen...

 

 

9 hours ago, Mark Kmiecik said:

I bet they would really look good polished.

Agreed. Especially #1.

 

A little experiment I made with #2 scares me of polishing both these pieces. See, I tried to check the hardness of the second rock and eventually, a steel knife cut it, leaving a bit of a gash behind. I didn't like how that looked, so I took a piece of superfine sanding paper and smoothed it.  With the result that the the light grey rock just turned dark grey and waxy there and I can't see the dark spots in that particular area any longer.  Odd, it's as if those dark spots are just at the very surface...

[Rockwood]

3 hours ago, Pippa said:

Really?  What makes you think so?

That rock (the 2nd one) neither looks nor feels like marble to me.  At all.  At least not any marble I've ever seen...

It's the snowy look that suggests metamorphosed oolitic limestone to me. I could be wrong about it.

Here is an example of what is in my mind.