Hip to be square? What am I?

[Nyla Alisia]

I was out poking around for fossils after a pretty big king tide storm on the Oregon coast, outside of Newport, in Lincoln County. I found several odd fossils I had not seen at this location before, but nothing as strange as this one! At first, I thought it looked like bone, so I wrapped it and put it in my pack. I when I got home and looked at the structure, I realized it was not bone, It has an almost woven look to the pattern between the cross sections, while the raised cross sections looked completely different. Also, the shape was truly square, and it was not just the wear of time that gave it its unique shape as I had thought at first glance, in the field. It is not flat, it is raised up in the center like a pyramid, the light cross sections are raised slightly higher than the darker sections which are just a touch concave. It measures almost perfectly at 1.5 inches on all sides. The matrix that it is in has a natural crack that looks as though you could pop the fossil out, and perhaps expose what is underneath. I am not going to touch it at this point.

I did some internet research on this strange little creature and came up with some things like Goniophyllum and Conulariid. My issue with those is they seem to come from an era much older than the Astoria Formation and Nye Formation which are the most exposed in this area, so I am not comfortable making a visual ID on this mystery coral/critter. Any ideas?
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[Gary Grimsley]

This appears to be half of a shark vertebra.

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