Favositid coral in the Devonian of Ohio, USA.

The Columbus Limestone is a significant carbonate unit in the Devonian of central and northern Ohio. It's actually part of a much more widespread sheet of Devonian carbonates that extends from New York State to the Midwest. The Columbus Limestone represents deposition in a subtropical, shallow-water, carbonate platform environment. The rocks are principally micritic limestones, fossiliferous wackestones, and fossiliferous packstones. Some chert nodules are present in the unit. Fossils are typical Paleozoic shallow marine invertebrates - favositid corals, rugose corals, stromatoporoids brachiopods, crinoids, blastoids, bryozoans, trilobites, bivalves, gastropods, cephalopods, rostroconchs, and tentaculites. Microfossils include conodonts and charophyte oogonia. Other fossils in the Columbus Limestone include vertebrates (fish), land plants (rare), and trace fossils. Some fossil horizons in the Columbus Limestone are partially silicified.

The thick-bedded Columbus Limestone is overlain by the thin-bedded Delaware Limestone. The contact is a prominent disconformity (a type II sequence boundary). Biostratigraphic studies have shown that one conodont biozone is missing at the Columbus-Delaware contact in central Ohio, probably representing ~1 to 3 million years. The base of the Columbus Limestone is a major, continent-wide unconformity representing the Tippecanoe-Kaskaskia megasequence boundary (a type I sequence boundary).

Seen here is a fossil colonial coral in fossiliferous limestone matrix from a Columbus Limestone exposure in Ohio's Marblehead Peninsula. The coral is a favositid, also known as a "honeycomb coral". Favositids are an extinct group of tabulate corals that were common in ancient shallow seas during the Middle Paleozoic.

Classification: Animalia, Cnidaria, Anthozoa, Tabulata, Favositidae

Stratigraphy: Marblehead Member, Columbus Limestone, Eifelian Stage, lower Middle Devonian