A New Species of Endopachys (Anthozoa: Scleractinia) from the Miocene of Florida

Abstract

The genus Endopachys includes several species of Cenozoic and Recent solitary ahermatypic tropical corals characterized by their free, compressed cuneiform coralla, porous dendrophylliid structures, and septal insertion following the Pourtales plan. The type species is E. maclurii (Lea) from the middle and upper Eocene of the Gulf Coastal Plain (Figs. 4 ,5). Other species from the same terrain were described by Vaughan (1900) as E. lonsdalei, E. shaleri, and E. minuta. None are yet known from the later American Cenozoic with the exception of the subject of the present note, and the genus is extinct in America. However, it is still wide-spread in the indo-Pacific on sandy or mud bottoms in depths of 40 to 350 meters with the species E. grayi Milne-Edwards & Haime, 1848, which includes, according to Umbgrove (1950): E. japonicum Yabe & Eguchi, E. oahense Vaughan, and E . vaughani Durham-Recent of the Persian Gulf, Indonesia, Philippines, Japan, Hawaii, Gulf of California; and Neogene of J ava, Philippines, Taiwan, Japan. E. grayi lacks the distinctive paracostal ridges of the American forms, to which it can only be distantly related.