| A visitor of the Paleozoic Era stands next to a hill composed of the upper Mississippian Diamond Peak Formation, eastern Eureka County, Nevada, not far from the western border of White Pine County, Nevada. The Diamond Peak Formation produces one of the largest late Mississippi fossil faunas in the US West, including: foraminfera; corals; bryozoans; brachiopods; gastropods; pelecypods (AKA, the bivalves); cephalopods (numerous species of goniatites ammonoids); crinoids; ostracods; and conodonts (diminutive tooth-like denticles, unrelated to modern jaws, that served to enable food gathering in an extinct lamprey eel-like organism). |