period: Ordovician (485.4-443.8 million years ago)

excavation site: northern Poland

Halysites belongs to an extinct group of corals known as tabulate corals.

They lived in warm seas, where along with sponges and other corals were the creators of first reefs. Coralits, i.e. the skeletons of single specimens, are oval and contact with each other with a narrower edges forming a chain shaped colony. The fossils of the tabulate corals found in Poland come from the terrain of modern Sweden, from where they were transported millions of years later by a continental glacier during the Pleistocene epoch glaciation.

The piece comes from the collection of Polish Academy of Sciences Museum of the Earth in Warsaw.