The Position and Age of the Sciotoville Bar Locality, Southern Ohio
The Sciotoville Bar was a rock ledge exposed along the northeast bank of the Ohio River between the Little Scioto River and Wolfred Run (NEJ4, sec. 8, T2N, R20W, Scioto County, Ohio). This well-known fossil locality yielded an abundant fauna from concretions in a shale which formed a portion of the ledge. Since 1920, however, the locality has been flooded by the pool created first from construction of Lock and Dam 31, and later by the Captain Anthony Meldahl Locks and Dam. Information assembled from various sources indicates that the main concretionary horizon represents the upper portion of the Portsmouth Member of the Cuyahoga Formation. In addition, a previously unpublished measured section of this locality by Hyde is now available which describes the location of the concretionary fossil-bearing horizon. The combined ammonoid fauna from the upper Cuyahoga and the overlying lower Logan Formation suggests a Kinderhookian rather than Osagean age for the concretionary horizon.
The Mississippian ammonoids Karagandoceras and Kazakhstania from Ohio
The poorly known ammonoid genera Karagandoceras and Kazakhstania are sparsely represented in the upper Cuyahoga and lower Logan Formations of Ohio. Karagandoceras bradfordi, n. sp. from the Byer Member of the Logan Formation, is the first North American record of this genus. Voehringerites, n. gen. (type species: Karagandoceras peracutum Vihringer) is erected for specimens from the H6nnetal, Sauerland, West Germany, previously included in Karagandoceras. Collectively, ammonoids from the upper Cuyahoga and lower Logan Formations suggest a Kinderhookian age assignment for this stratigraphic interval.
Time and Heritage
As a historian studying what can be considered a form of intellectual history, I have slowly come to adopt Michel de Certeau’s observation made at the end of the 1980s that ‘objectifying the past, for the last three centuries, has undoubtedly left unconsidered time within a discipline that has continued to use it as a taxonomic instrument’. To a certain degree, time has become commonplace for the historian who has preserved or instrumentalized it. It is not considered because it is inconceivable, but because we do not think of it or, more simply, we do not think about it. As a historian attempting to pay attention to the time I’m living in, I have thus, like many others, noticed the swift development of the category of the present until it has become obvious that the present is omnipresent. This is what I refer to here as ‘presentism’.