Corals from a dismembered late Paleozoic paleo-Pacific plateau

TLDR: A coral belonging to the rare Late Mississippian-Early Pennsylvanian Family Pseudopavonidae and a specimen of the Permian waagenophyllid coral genus Parawentzelella have been recovered from the Cache Creek assemblage in northern British Columbia and from a small limestone block in southern British Columbia, Canada, respectively as discussed by the authors.

Abstract: A coral belonging to the rare Late Mississippian–Early Pennsylvanian Family Pseudopavonidae and a specimen of the Permian waagenophyllid coral genus Parawentzelella have been recovered from the Cache Creek assemblage in northern British Columbia and from a small limestone block in southern British Columbia, Canada, respectively. Both of these fossils are closely related to corals known from eastern Japan and western Sze-chuan, China; Parawentzelella also occurs in Indochina. These corals apparently occur in shallow-water carbonates that overlie pieces of oceanic volcanic ridges or plateaus. In both Asia and North America these corals now lie geographically close to coeval, but completely different, coral faunas that lived on shallow carbonate platforms built on continental shelves. This suggests that the circum-Pacific terranes bearing these unusual corals were displaced from a single, shallow-water oceanic region that in late Paleozoic time lay in the paleo-Pacific Ocean far from any continental margin. In Late Permian or early Mesozoic time the region colonized by these fossils was torn apart; the rock masses bearing these fossils were then carried on oceanic plates to subduction zones at continental margins on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, where they became lodged.