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Margaret, sorry I didn’t notice your question until now. Yes, this is a marine pelagic organism. Each of the”segments” contained an animal. They were internally connected to each other and are considered hemichordates. They became extinct in the Carboniferous. I’m not an expert on these but we do have another person in our club that is who could provide more technical information.

I’m a PhD student working on graptolites at the University at Buffalo. Very cool to see this group up here, it doesn’t get enough love. Anyway, this particular one is no longer called Climacograptus, it is now Geniculograptus and either G. typicalis or G. pygmaeus (would need to have a scale bar to tell between them). Also, the planktic graptolites died out in the lowest Devonian, and the benthic ones died out by the end of the Carboniferous except for the lineage leading to Rhabdopleura which appears to be a living graptolite!

James,

I just found your comment. Up until recently, these posts were not being forwarded so I didn’t know about it until I went looking. Thanks very much. We have a local graptolite amateur expert in the Dry Dredgers, Rich Fuchs. I knew I should have asked him about the name before posting. I hope you are considering coming to our conference in June. I’m sure Rich would love to meet another graptolite worker. I’ll let him know you are studying them. If you give me your contact info I can pass it on to him.