Hannes Löser

Jurassic and Cretaceous Corals - Morphology, classification, determination, and localities

Fossile Korallen aus Jura und Kreide – Aufbau, Klassifikation, Bestimmung und Fundmöglichkeiten

CPress Verlag Dresden
ISBN 978-3-931689-12-4
VI+206 Pages, 279 (15 colour) Figures
(440 single pictures)
270 x 190mm, hardcover
Published in August 2009.
* in the German language *

All figures have been taken from the book.
Coral reefs are complex ecosystems. Their main producers - the corals - are more primitive organisms. Nevertheless they create complicated constructed skeletons presenting a wide range of shapes. For half a billion years exist corals, for about 250 million years the stony corals (Scleractinia) which colonize also today oceans. Changing environmental conditions forced the sensible organisms to create again and again new constructions resulting in a almost unlimited richness of forms through time. Not much is known about the relationship between the construction of the skeleton made of calcium carbonate and the biology of the living animal, mainly for groups which lived in periods long ago making classification and taxonomy difficult.

This book will be help to work with Mesozoic corals (without Triassic) and gives in five large chapters (morphology; palaeoecology, diversity and evolution; sampling and examination; systematics and list of common genera; coral localities) insight in the most important aspects of a difficult organism group.

The book is based on lecture material and is written for geology and biology students, as well for interested amateurs and biologists or geologists who want to gain insight in this invertebrate group. Much yet unpublished data on systematics, diversity and taxonomy makes the book up to date and might be interesting also for specialists.

All drawn figures of the book are new; the majority of fossil thin sections has been not published before. The numerous illustrations of fossil corals have been selected from a pool of more than 4000 scanned thin sections and peels - material from the whole world, among them samples from countries as exotic as the Iran, Jamaica, Japan or Tanzania.

Contents (PDF)

  1. Introduction (historical aspects, reasons for coral research)
  2. Morphology (functional units, skeleton organisation, septa, columella, wall/epitheca/coenosteum, endotheca, budding) - Examples (PDF) p. 006, 007, 023
  3. Palaeoeocology, diagenesis, distribution in space and time - Examples (PDF) p. 029-030
  4. From sampling to the publication (sampling, examination methods, measure and count, statistics, digital image processing, figures, registration) - Examples (PDF) p. 056-057
  5. Systematic part (species concept, nomenclatory rules, classification, determination - about 150 genera are presented with a description, remarks and most of them with one or more pictures) - Examples (PDF) p. 112-113, 126-127
  6. Coral localities - Examples (PDF) p. 171-172
  7. Various appendices (references and advice to obtain them, addresses, stratigraphical table, explication of terms, list of figured specimen, index)

They are examples for the development of certain characteristics such as the wall, perforation of septa etc.

Orders :
CPress Verlag, Max-Schwarze-Str. 36, 01257 Dresden
Fax +49 (0) 3212 1007315
E-Mail:

[25 June 2010]