Lycopod From Wisconsin?

[Bill Hoddson]

Posting this for someone on Facebook - found near the Mississippi River, SW Wisconsin. 

 

Lycopod root?

[Tidgy's Dad]

I can't see enough detail. But those look like corallites to me.  

[Rockwood]

Pretty sure it isn't a stigmaria. 

Steinkern (maybe) of something that had been encrusted by a heliolitid might could look like this ? Somehow the texture looks off to be a body fossil of coral.

[Bill Hoddson]

3 minutes ago, Tidgy's Dad said:

I can't see enough detail. But those look like corallites to me.  

Possibly, but the tapered spiral pattern has me leaning toward a lycopod 

[Wrangellian]

Would that pattern be more indicative of a Receptaculites/Fisherites of some sort?

[connorp]

My vote is for coral. Even without seeing the specimen, the geology of the area is way too old. Southwest Wisconsin is mostly Ordovician, with patches of Cambrian and Silurian. The only place you could find in situ lycopods in Wisconsin would be in the very geographically restricted Middle Devonian of SE Wisconsin.

[Rockwood]

Just to polish it a might. I believe the morphology of a growing tip to a stigmaria is slightly more varied from the mature arrangement in the pattern of rootlets that this appears to be. 

[minnbuckeye]

We need other views to see if fischerite is a possibility. I lean towards it as the fossil it resembles most. Many fischerites are found in the Ordovician rock along the Mississippi of Wisconsin

[FossilDAWG]

I agree with the recepticulitid suggestion, of which Fisheries is the most likely genus.  The spiral arrangement is diagnostic, and no corals have this feature.

 

Don

[Tetradium]

16 hours ago, minnbuckeye said:

We need other views to see if fischerite is a possibility. I lean towards it as the fossil it resembles most. Many fischerites are found in the Ordovician rock along the Mississippi of Wisconsin

seem kind of unusual shape but then again it look like it had been water worn so camera angles make it look different. Just a guess from me - you knows the region better than me. My book listed two species,

[Twinwaffle]

So I thought I'd just flipped past something like this in my book. That was Rhizopoterion, and not as similar as I'd thought. So I searched online for images of other ventriculitid sponges, and came across this one (see image below), which seems so similar, and I've never even heard of Late Turonian and Early Coniacian so I still thought yeah...maybe, until I noticed the tag for the Cretaceous period. Oh. So I'm not so clever after all. But it would have been pretty cool if I had not been wrong.

 

Okay, I totally failed, but I learned that I know pretty much nothing, as opposed to next to nothing. Oh well.  

 

Edited to add Sporadoscinia alcynoides (from photo caption)

https://paleoptg.wordpress.com/tag/palaeoecology/

(Also these, but not)

Edited October 14, 2021 by Twinwaffle
Forgot to describre photo: Sporadoscinia alcynoides