Costistricklandia is a common, easily recognizable pentamerid brachiopod in upper Llandovery to lowest Wenlock rocks of eastern Laurentia, Avalonia and Baltica. In this paper, the poorly known Costistricklandia canadensis (Billings) is re-described from the upper Telychian Rockway Dolomite of the Niagara Escarpment, Ontario. Compared to the relatively complete record of the Stricklandia-Costistricklandia evolution in the Welsh Borderland and the Baltic region, true representatives of the Stricklandia lens lineage are sporadic in North America, including those from the Merrimack Formation of Anticosti Island, the Red Mountain Formation of Alabama, the Hopkinton Formation of Iowa, and the Nonda Formation of the northern Rocky Mountains. Although the exact mode of speciation in the Stricklandia-Costistricklandia and the Pentamerus-Pentameroides transitions remains debatable, the common association of Costistricklandia and Pentameroides make them a useful concurrent biozone for correlating middle to upper Telychian rocks of North America and Europe. Paleobiogeographically, the Pentameroides-Costistricklandia Fauna marks the third major pulse of pentamerid faunal migration between Laurentia and its adjacent paleo-plates during the Early Silurian, following the limited intercontinental dispersal of the early Llandovery Virgiana Fauna and the quasi-cosmopolitan dispersal of the middle Llandovery Pentamerus Fauna.