' Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Geology Today, Vol. 20, No. 6, NovemberDecember 2004 224 GEODIGEST Feature A worms eye view of the Early Palaeozoic sea floor D. McIlroy 1 & M. Garton 2 1 Earth Sciences Department, Memorial University, St Johns, Newfoundland A1B 3XS, Canada 2 Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Liverpool, Brownlow Street, Liverpool L69 3BX, UK The pipe rock lithofacies has been much maligned by many generations of undergraduates as being dull. We attempt herein to demonstrate some of the subtleties of the pipe-rock ecosystem and show that ichnology can be a most useful tool to stratigraphers, sedimentologists and petroleum geologists. The Pipe Rock of the Scottish Highlands (more for- mally known as the Eriboll Sandstone) is, to most British geologists at least, the best-known example of a quartzose sandstone lithology common in Lower Palaeozoic successions the world over. The character- istic feature of pipe rocks is a fabric of prominent