What's this trace fossil?

[JimTh]

Found this slab today. Early Pennsylvanian.  The brown blotches are lepidodendron leaves I believe. They've stained the surrounding stone. 

Edit: I should probably add that it's from southern Indiana. 

 

[izak_]

No idea what caused them, but very nice find. 

[Miocene_Mason]

Very strange, I’m no expert in this area but the parallel tracks make me think of something like arthropluera trackway (can’t be eurypterid which sometimes did climb up to land because it lacks a tail drag) but the wierd pattern around it puts me off from this. These are terrestrial fossils I assume? 

[ynot]

How about spider (?).

[JimTh]

10 minutes ago, WhodamanHD said:

 These are terrestrial fossils I assume? 

 

Mud flat kind of situation I think. 

[Miocene_Mason]

6 minutes ago, ynot said:

How about spider (?).

Had yet to evolve, although trigontarpids existed (probably spelled that wrong)

[Miocene_Mason]

After some online research, cruziana, trilobite tracks are found in similarly colored rock of the same age in Perry county, Indiana. Could these be the culprit?

[ynot]

From wikipedia...

At one stage the oldest fossil spider was believed to be Attercopus which lived 380 million years ago during the Devonian. Attercopus was placed as the sister-taxon to all living spiders, but has now been reinterpreted as a member of a separate, extinct order Uraraneida which could produce silk, but did not have true spinnerets.
The oldest true spiders are thus Carboniferous in age, or about 300 million years. Most of these early segmented fossil spiders from the Coal Measures of Europe and North America probably belonged to the Mesothelae, or something very similar, a group of primitive spiders with the spinnerets placed underneath the middle of the abdomen, rather than at the end as in modern spiders. They were probably ground-dwelling predators, living in the giant clubmoss and fern forests of the mid-late Palaeozoic, where they were presumably predators of other primitive arthropods. Silk may have been used simply as a protective covering for the eggs, a lining for a retreat hole, and later perhaps for simple ground sheet web and trapdoor construction.

 

 

Looks old enough to be around in the pennsylvanian.

I think trilobite tracks are more uniform in caricature.

[Miocene_Mason]

11 minutes ago, ynot said:

From wikipedia...

At one stage the oldest fossil spider was believed to be Attercopus which lived 380 million years ago during the Devonian. Attercopus was placed as the sister-taxon to all living spiders, but has now been reinterpreted as a member of a separate, extinct order Uraraneida which could produce silk, but did not have true spinnerets.
The oldest true spiders are thus Carboniferous in age, or about 300 million years. Most of these early segmented fossil spiders from the Coal Measures of Europe and North America probably belonged to the Mesothelae, or something very similar, a group of primitive spiders with the spinnerets placed underneath the middle of the abdomen, rather than at the end as in modern spiders. They were probably ground-dwelling predators, living in the giant clubmoss and fern forests of the mid-late Palaeozoic, where they were presumably predators of other primitive arthropods. Silk may have been used simply as a protective covering for the eggs, a lining for a retreat hole, and later perhaps for simple ground sheet web and trapdoor construction.

 

 

Looks old enough to be around in the pennsylvanian.

I think trilobite tracks are more uniform in caricature.

My bad, I thought this fossil was from the mississipian. I read to fast sometimes....

I’ve never seen or heard of spider trace fossils, do you have any pictures?

[ynot]

1 minute ago, WhodamanHD said:

I’ve never seen or heard of spider trace fossils, do you have any pictures?

I have not heard of or seen any either. But it looks like some modern spider tracks.

 

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Carl Sagan.

 

But I am guessing on this.

[doushantuo]

Slightly Kouphichnium-like.

 

 

[westcoast]

This appears to be algal biofilm mat. Which fits with your 'mud flat situation'. Some trace-like features can be produced on these mats by inorganic means although I'm not sure in this case.

[JimTh]

Palaios appears to have a paper or article on wingless insect trace fossils. One of their images looks sort of similar. 

 

The bottom left one:

 

[doushantuo]

Getty/Sproule etc,for those who want to know(2013)

Simon Braddy has written some good stuff on slightly out-of-the- ordinary athropod trace fossils,btw

"Apterygote" morphology:

(NB:RG link impossibly long)

[Rockwood]

4 hours ago, westcoast said:

This appears to be algal biofilm mat. Which fits with your 'mud flat situation'. Some trace-like features can be produced on these mats by inorganic means although I'm not sure in this case.

Settling due to dewatering of the layer beneath the mat. 

[doushantuo]

 

Can you cite an example?

I posted chapter 2 by Gerdes out of the "Atlas of Mat structures",a while back,BTW

 

[Rockwood]

It's something I picked up at the Blue Beach Fossil Museum in N.S.. I'll see if I have any good examples to photograph.

[doushantuo]

woild be awesome,RW!

for those interested in complicate micmat structures:

[Rockwood]

Here's what I have.

[ynot]

12 minutes ago, Rockwood said:

Here's what I have.

Just an opinion, but it does not look the same to Me.

Yours looks like branching rivulets, where the OP's look like fuzzy single stripes.

[doushantuo]

Kouphichnium tends to be preserved (with degrees of distinctiveness)carapax imprints

Undertrack?

And then again,maybe Westcoast is right

[Rockwood]

10 minutes ago, ynot said:

Just an opinion, but it does not look the same to Me.

Yours looks like branching rivulets, where the OP's look like fuzzy single stripes.

It was intended to show a more obvious, but similar, result of a somewhat flexible surface area being reduced in size.

In my opinion the OP is of a surface that was more fuzzy to begin with.

I detect problems in determining the direction of the tracks in places that seem inconsistent with them being tracks. 

[ynot]

Could it be that whatever made the track was dragging the algal mat into the distorted ridging that follows the track?