For a long time I have several pebbles of limestone-shell rock with fossilized imprints of ancient organisms. They were selected in different time and in different places, now I can’t remember. Some, probably, were found in a limestone quarry, some were brought to me from the Atarskaya bow, some, perhaps, brought from the Crimea.
They lie with me for a long time, just my hands did not reach to photograph and describe. Today the planned walk in the forest was canceled, I had some free time and I took a few pictures. This is how one of the pebbles looks like in general. It is small, just over 3 cm.
What it consists of used to be the remains of living organisms of warm shallow sea water that fell to the muddy bottom. Here you can see pieces of shells of ancient mollusks, imprints of bryozoans and pieces of the stem of crinoids (sea lilies). Let's see which one is which.
bryozoans, especially the Gymnolaemata order is easily recognizable by its reticulate structure. These are colonies of marine invertebrate organisms, known since the Ordovician period, and still existing in seas of various salinity. As the name implies, the colonies of some bryozoans look like a continuous cover of moss. Some bryozoans form crusty and lumpy colonies on hard surfaces (stones, shells, etc.), others are fan-shaped or bushy in appearance. Modern bryozoans, for example, look like this:
They are the main mass of recognizable fragments on the stone. But do not forget, bryozoans are not plants, although they look like them, they are full-fledged animals that feed on various microorganisms and diatoms.
Let's look at another stone:
Here, in the same way, the bulk of the fossils are reticulated fragments of bryozoans.
In the lower part in the middle you can see a round circle with notches and a hole in the center (the same "gear" can be found on the right side in the first photo). This is one of the stem segments. sea lily(or crinoids, lat. Crinoidea). These are benthic animals with a sedentary lifestyle, belonging to the type of echinoderms. They are even more similar appearance on plants - their body consists of a stem, calyx and brachioles - hands.
Most species of modern crinoids have lost this stem. During the life of the animal, the stalk consisted of round segments connected by muscles; in the fossil state, they often fall apart. Petrified segments of sea lilies are called trochitis. Because of their gear-like appearance, theories of alien contact millions of years ago constantly arise, and Trochites are trying to be presented as ancient details of alien mechanisms. And so they have been known since ancient times, the first written references date back to the 17th century. The star-shaped polygonal segments of the crinoids were called "stone stars" by the British and made various assumptions about their connection with heavenly bodies. On the coast of Northumberland, these fossils are called "St. Cuthbert's rosary." Whole sea lily prints look like this:
Crinoids (photo by user galamish from Yandex.photos)
Of course, in stone a large number of fragments and imprints of shells of various mollusks:
Moreover, they have a completely recognizable shape, characteristic of modern seashells. For example, the shell at the top center of the bottom image, next to the trochite, is quite similar to a modern scallop.
What kind of long fossil in the picture below - I find it difficult to say. Maybe a piece of stem, maybe something else.
And just a couple of pictures, try to identify something on them yourself:
Also known and commonly found fossils that you can find, for example, on the banks of rivers, are belemnites(popularly called "devil's finger"), which are the remains of a petrified inner shell of ancient mollusks that look like squids. Well-preserved mother-of-pearl shells or simply imprints of cephalopod shells are also widely known. ammonites. Their ribbed shells, twisted into a spiral, can be from 1-2 centimeters to 2 meters in diameter.
From trilobites to tyrannosaurs, most fossils are the remains of creatures with a rigid shell or skeleton. These materials do not decompose easily, but after a while they are covered with sedimentary deposits that retain information about the creature that is still with us, millions of years after it died.
Soft-bodied organisms such as worms decay rapidly and their fossils are very fragmentary. In exceptional circumstances, however, their remains have been preserved, sometimes in the most unusual places. Paleontologists can use such discoveries to open new pages in the history of life on Earth. A recent incredible find in 50-million-year-old Antarctic rocks is fossilized worm sperm. So there are far stranger fossils than dinosaur bones. Here are some of the most unusual examples.
1 Ancient Sperm
Worm sperm. Photo: Palaeobiology Department, Swedish Museum of Natural History
This remarkable find, a fossilized clitellate spermatozoon, is the oldest animal sperm ever discovered. She broke the previous record when springtail sperm was found in at least 10 million years old Baltic amber.
The preservation of sperm is made possible because such worms reproduce by releasing their eggs and sperm into protective cocoons. Therefore, the hard shell kept intact the cocoons that scientists found in shallow sea bays on the Antarctic Peninsula. The spermatozoon was found on a piece of gravel thanks to an analysis carried out using a powerful microscope.
This sperm most closely resembles the sperm of leech-like worms that attach themselves to crayfish. However, they are currently found only in the northern hemisphere. Researchers believe it could be the sperm of another unknown ancient worm.
2 Fossilized excrement and vomit of ancient reptiles
Strange things are found on fossils. Photo: Poozeum/Wikimedia Commons
Coprolites - petrified excrement, are of great paleoecological significance. From them you can determine what the extinct creature ate.
In Australia, they determined that Cretaceous plesiosaurs were lower feeders, that is, they foraged at the bottom of reservoirs. Fossilized vomit containing squashed fish found in Poland has helped explain how life resurfaced after the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history. In Jurassic shales from Peterborough and Whitby in England, layers of squid-like belemnites have been interpreted as ichthyosaur vomit.
3 Silurian Shrimp
If a 50-million-year-old sperm was a big surprise, what about a 425-million-year-old shrimp penis? In a ditch near the Anglo-Welsh border, in the early 2000s, a tiny ostracod was found, by all indications, clearly male. It was preserved in three dimensions, all soft tissues were petrified.
During the Silurian period (443-419 million years ago), the Welsh frontier was on the shelf of a tropical sea. Marine animals died of suffocation and were buried under a thick layer of petrified ash from volcanoes. Ostracods and countless other small fossils cannot be examined with a microscope, however their mineral tomb must be gradually excavated and the fossil beings must be recreated in 3D digital images.
4 Yorkshire Rhinos
Buckland in the Hyena Cave. Photo: Public Domain
In 1821, very strange fossils were found in Kirkdale Cave in North Yorkshire, England. The gravel pit workers found a deep crevice in the rock, full of large animal bones. At first glance, it seemed that they were the bones of cows, but a local naturalist noticed that they looked unusual. The remains were sent to Oxford University to Professor William Buckland.
Buckland was an outstanding experimental scientist, the founder of paleoecology. He determined that these were the bones of large herbivores such as elephants and rhinos. The bones were partially gnawed, and petrified excrement was scattered all over the place, which by all indications belonged to hyenas. Buckland came to the conclusion that this cave was a den of hyenas.
5. Mysterious monster
A piece of history. Photo: Ghedoghedo/CC BY SA 3.0-Wikimedia Commons
Fossils in Maison Creek, Illinois, were discovered during coal mining in the 19th century. But it was only in the 1950s that the place became known thanks to the discovery of Francis Tully. He found a perfectly preserved fossil of a very strange beast: the imprint of a soft-bodied animal was found inside a cracked boulder.
It was a unique find. The beast was given the name Tullimonstrum gregarium. The fossil even received state status in the state of Illinois. However, no one knows what kind of animal it is. It is several inches long, has a long snout with toothy pincers for a mouth, two stalked eyes, a segmented body, and a fin-like tail. It was probably a predator, and the stone in which it was found suggests that it lived in shallow tropical seas. This animal cannot be classified as another invertebrate species, living or extinct. Even in the case of exceptional preservation, fossils are always surprising.
Liam Herringshaw is a lecturer in geology and physical geography at the University of Hull in the UK. This article was previously published on TheConversation.com
Dr. Andrew Snelling
Fossils of marine animals are found in rock layers located much higher than sea level. This is another evidence of the truth of God's Word.
If the Genesis Flood, as described in Genesis 7 and 8, did indeed occur, what evidence would we expect to find? In the previous article in this series, we provided an overview of the six main evidences for the Genesis Flood. Now let's take a closer look at evidence number one.
www.webshots.com
Reading in the 7th chapter of Genesis that all the mountain peaks and high hills were covered with water, because of which all life on land was flooded and perished, the answer to the above question should be obvious. Wouldn't we expect to find layers of rock all over the earth filled with billions of dead animals and plants that were quickly buried and petrified in sand, silt and lime? Of course. And that's exactly what we find.
- #one. Fossilized remains of marine animals have been found far above sea level;
- #2. Rapid burial of animals and plants;
- #3. Rapidly deposited layers of sedimentary rocks, occupying vast areas;
- #4. Sedimentary material that has been transported over long distances;
- #5. Slight traces of erosion or its complete absence between the layers;
- #6. Many strata deposited in rapid succession.
Fossils of marine animals high above sea level
Geologists know the indisputable fact that on every continent of the earth, fossils of marine animals are found in rocks located high above sea level. For example, marine fossils have been found in most of the rock layers of the Grand Canyon, including the topmost layer called the Kaibab Limestone. It comes to the surface at the edge of the canyon, and is located at an altitude of 2130-2140 m above sea level. Although this limestone is at the top of the Canyon layer sequence, it was deposited under oceanic waters saturated with calcareous sediments in northern Arizona (and beyond).
Other layers of the Grand Canyon also contain a huge amount of marine fossils. The best example is the Redwall Limestone, which contains mostly fossils of brachiopods (organisms that look like bivalves), bryozoans (), crinoids (sea lilies), bivalves (types of mollusks), gastropods (), trilobites, cephalopods, and even fish teeth.
Fossilized ammonites (spiraled marine cephalopods) are found in limestone beds high in the Himalayas of Nepal. How did marine fossils get into strata thousands of meters above sea level?
These fossils of sea creatures lie scattered in this limestone layer. For example, in the discovered samples of crinoids, the plates (disks) are completely separated from each other, while in life they are tightly connected and located one on top of the other, as a result of which their “stems” are formed. From this it can be concluded that these marine animals were destroyed and then buried in real calcareous deposits in disaster.
Fossils of marine animals are also found high in the Himalayas.- the highest mountains in the world, reaching a height of 8848 m above sea level. For example, fossilized ammonites (spiraled marine cephalopods), as shown, are found in limestone beds in the Himalayas of Nepal. Geologists agree that these calcareous marine fossils could only have been buried by ocean waters. How did these limestone layers end up so high in the Himalayas?
We must remember that the layers of rocks in the Himalayas and other mountain ranges around the world were set aside during the Flood even before education these high mountains. In fact, many of the mountain ranges mentioned were pushed up by the movements of the earth's crust to their current heights at the end of the Flood. This is referred to in Psalm 103:8, where the waters of the Flood are said to descend into the valleys at a time when, in the final stage of the catastrophe, the mountains rose.
Explanation
There is only one possible explanation for this phenomenon - in the past, ocean waters covered all continents at a certain time.
Could the continents have sunk below present-day sea level so that ocean waters flooded them?
Not! Continents are made up of lighter rocks, less dense than those of the ocean floor and the mantle below the continents. In reality, continents tend to automatically rise, and thus "float" on the mantle rocks above the ocean floor. This explains why modern continents have such high elevations compared to the deep ocean floor, and why ocean basins can hold such vast amounts of water.
There must have been two mechanisms for rising sea levels. First, water was added to the ocean. Secondly, the bottom of the ocean itself rose.
So there must be another way to explain how the oceans covered the continents. The sea level had to rise so that the waters of the ocean flooded them. What led to such consequences?
In the past, there must have been two mechanisms for sea level rise.
First, water was added to the ocean. Secondly, the bottom of the ocean itself rose.
Today, scientists are watching the melting of the polar ice sheet as excess water will cause sea levels to rise and coastal areas to flood.
The Bible gives us a source additional water. In Genesis 7:11 we read that at the beginning of the Flood all the fountains of the great deep were broken up. In other words, the earth's crust cracked all over the earth, and water escaped from the bowels of the planet. Then Genesis 7:24–8:2 says that these springs were open for 150 days. Naturally, the volume of the ocean after that increased so much that the ocean waters flooded all the continents.
Second, if the ocean floor were to rise on its own, it would subsequently successfully raise the sea level.
Well preserved bivalves
The Bible points to the source of this sea level rise: molten rock.
The catastrophic rupture of the earth's crust referred to in Genesis 7:11 would release not only a huge amount of water from the earth's interior, but also a huge amount of molten rock. The ocean floor would be replaced by hot lava. Less dense than the original oceanic crust, these hot lava masses would have been thicker. Therefore, the new ocean floor would have risen, raising the sea level by more than 1000 m. Since the mountains that exist today were not yet formed, it is likely that the antediluvian hills and mountains were not as high as modern ones. And a rise in sea level of more than 1000 m would be sufficient to flood the Antediluvian land.
Toward the end of the Flood, as the molten rock cooled and the ocean floor sank, sea levels dropped and waters drained from the continents into new, deeper ocean basins. As we said earlier, Psalm 103:8 describes how the mountains were lifted up at the end of the Flood, and the waters of the Flood flowed into the valleys from the new emerging land surfaces. This is consistent with the abundant evidence that present-day mountains have only recently risen to their incredible heights.
uplift of the ocean floor
Marine life originally exists in the ocean (top diagram).
Sea creatures certainly live in the ocean (A). For their deposition on the continents to occur, sea levels had to rise.
The Earth's crust heats up and breaks apart (middle diagram).
(1) During Noah's Flood, molten rock was released from the bowels of the earth and began to replace the originally existing ocean floor. The oceanic crust was covered with hot lava masses. (2) Because of the hot molten rock, the oceanic crust became less dense but thicker. (3) Molten rock has replaced and pushed out the original oceanic crust below the level of the continents. (A) The sea level rose more than 1000m, sea creatures were transported to the continents, buried in sediments and fossilized.
Marine life remains on the continent (bottom diagram).
Toward the end of the Flood, the oceanic crust cooled and the ocean floor sank. As the waters drained from the continents, the sea level dropped, leaving sea creatures (A) on the continents high above sea level.
Conclusion
Fossilized marine animals and plants found in rock layers hundreds and thousands of meters above sea level are silent evidence that ocean waters have flooded continents and carried billions of sea creatures. This is how billions of dead animals and plants were buried in rock layers all over the earth.
We know that the catastrophe of the Genesis Flood was real event because God Himself speaks about it in His Word - the Bible. Now we can also see compelling evidence supporting ancient and clear Biblical teaching.
In the next article in this special series on geology, we will examine in detail the geological evidence for the rapid burial of plants and animals by the waters of the Flood, as described in Genesis 7–8.
Andrew Snelling, Dr. Geological PhD, University of Sydney, expert in geological research, worked in organizations in Australia and America. Dr. Snelling is a professor at the Institute for Creation Research in Santee, California and the author of many scientific articles.
Everyone from childhood or youth knows, or rather heard and remembers, that life on Earth originated 3.5 billion years ago. Huge number, right? I don’t know about you, but for me it is perceived almost the same as the infinity of the cosmos. Yes, yes, I do not perceive values close to infinity :). Even in my youth, I tried to imagine the infinity of the universe, and in order to understand and realize something, I must definitely imagine, and so since then my consciousness has refused to fully realize the “billionth” and other dubious constants. And whenever I hear 285, or 400 million years ago, my mind generalizes it to a long, long time ago in deep antiquity. All this pile of zeros is not perceived at all, and you don’t even think about them, clinging only to the first three digits, or even completely whistles past your ears as an unnecessary fact. And yet there are times when you think about it all. What is all this for? Of course, many of you know, Samarans for sure, that the Zhiguli, I mean the Zhiguli Mountains, are made of limestone rocks. They were formed millions of years ago, at the bottom of ancient seas, from marine sediments, in the Carboniferous and Permian periods of the Paleozoic era. And the phrase that you read above seems like a dry fact about the past of our planet until you come across such an artifact.
And then all this information that you once heard or read and up to this moment, somewhere dormant in the labyrinths of memory, suddenly gathers into a single bundle and, as if having acquired energy, rolls over you in a wave. And the lack of information forces one to turn over articles in search of answers to emerging questions. And the Zhiguli Mountains themselves become interesting for you not only with their relief, natural beauties, gorgeous views, but also with the information that they carry layers of rock from which they are composed, page after page revealing their history for you, taking them millions of years into the past, telling a story about a world that none of the representatives of the human race has ever seen before.
It's hard to imagine now. But 300 million years ago, the waters of the ancient sea roared here, filling the trough of the East European Platform, it connected in the north with the Arctic and the Tethys Ocean in the south. What we see now was formed over millions of years and owes its appearance to living organisms that lived in ancient seas, countless shells of dead mollusks, corals, bryozoans formed colossal deposits of limestone. Of course, all of them are not completely preserved, but fragmented and changed by subsequent processes. But sometimes you can find quite distinctly preserved forms. So, for example, in the limestones of the Zhiguli Mountains, fusulinid fossils are often found, as if petrified grains scattered by someone, they protrude from the rock.
Fusulinids, a detachment of extinct foraminifera, their shells are spindle-shaped, from which they got their name (fusus - spindle), twisted in a spiral and divided by partitions into chambers. Fusulinids are bottom dwellers found only in deposits of the Carboniferous and Permian periods of the Paleozoic era.
The fossil is not always easy to distinguish among the stone, sometimes it is worth taking a closer look and only then will an alien from the past frozen in the stone, such as this four-beam rugosa coral, open up to the eye.
Rugoza are solitary polyps with an external limestone skeleton; their remains are very often found here in the Zhiguli and Sokolye mountains. They had a horn-like shape, some had a cap that closed the mouth in case of danger. Possessing increased requirements for temperature and transparency of water, they lived in the shallow, as a rule, in the shelf zone of the sea, fastening with the sharp end of the cone to the seabed.
Along with the fusulinids, they died out at the end of the Permian period, during the most massive extinction in the history of the Earth. Then 96% of marine species of organisms and 70% of terrestrial vertebrates died, and it was also the only known mass extinction insects (about 57% of the genera and 83% of the species of the entire class), after which it took about 30 million years to restore the biosphere.
And here is another copy of my fossil photo collection. This is a cross section of a sea lily stem.
Despite its name, the sea lily is not a plant, it is an animal with a sedentary lifestyle, they feed on plankton - foraminifera, small crustaceans, and invertebrate larvae. Fossil crinoids have been known since the Lower Ordovician, reaching their peak in the Middle Paleozoic, when over 5,000 species existed, most of which became extinct, but some species still exist today. The body of the animal resembles a cup, standing on a stem-leg in the center of which there is a mouth, and “hands” grow from the cup in different directions, outwardly resembling a flower.
Another photo trophy for me was this fragment of an ammonite shell. Unfortunately, I did not manage to find a whole shell.
These cephalopods, distant relatives of modern nautiluses, squids and octopuses, lived in almost all seas and today the fossilized shells of these mollusks can be found in almost any area. the globe. Ammonites ended their existence approximately 65-70 million years ago.
They disappeared along with the dinosaurs, although they appeared much earlier than them.
Well, similar bivalves exist to this day in the seas and rivers.
The sea level changed, the temperature and salinity of the water changed, all this influenced the biosphere of the sea and now this is clearly reflected in the cut of the sediment layers.
The East European platform was rising, and the sea was receding, the last sea, the waters of which rose to our latitudes, was the Akchagyl Sea. It came from the side of the current Caspian Sea, the Zhiguli Mountains already existed then and towered like an island above the raging waters.
Examining layer after layer, as if leafing through the pages of a book, you involuntarily wonder how fragile this whole world around us is.
How fragile life itself is and how great is the desire of all living things for life.
Wrote:
In September, I rested in Abkhazia and examined the cracked stone layers on the shore at the rocky base. I was struck by the pieces of rusted wire that I saw, about 8 mm in diameter, which both went inside and were, as it were, embedded on the surface. The fact that it was someone who once drilled and inserted reinforcement is excluded by the nature of the location. I then called the family, showed and voiced the only logical answer that came that the armature was before it was then in the formed stone. Well, I took a photo too.
Clickable. Pay attention to the semicircular face on the rock on the left. This place can be clearly seen in the original photograph of the author. Question to him - what is it? The remains of any more or less modern buildings, or is it part of a rock with such shapes?
On the one hand, we can conclude that this is indeed reinforcement, thick wire. Or maybe a natural fossil? Branch ancient tree? The original photo seems to even show the structure of the fossil (layering). But iron also exfoliates in this way during through corrosion.
Stone material - judging by the color of the lime content. And if these elements are ancient fossils, then this rock was once liquid.
At one time, a photograph of petrified "coils" in rock was circulating on the Internet. Everyone leaned towards the high-tech artifact.
But there is an explanation for this (click to enlarge the photo and the inscription):
Artifact from the Donetsk region. In fact, this territory is the bottom of the former sea, scientists for some reason called it
Or these "gears":
ancient marine organisms
Fossils like this have always amazed me:
wondered why living organisms did not decompose, they were not eaten by scavengers. They are visible here as the imprint of a whole organism, which was covered with liquid clay and which very quickly petrified. The rock material where such fossils occur is almost always sandstone.
Fossil from Mexico
Germany
Moreover, in the breed there are not only marine inhabitants, but also terrestrial ones. How did they get into this homogeneous material? There is no layering, there are no traces of many thousands of years of accumulation of sedimentary rock. It can be seen that this ancient bird was subsequently buried in fossilized masses along with leaves. And they didn't rot either.
Here is the output:
The excellent preservation of fossil remains and fossilized traces of the presence of animals indicate their instantaneous catastrophic burial, and the structures of geological rocks indicate a rapid process of formation. These examples are not isolated cases, but are widespread. Shown here is a female ichthyosaur caught in a catastrophe while giving birth.
Fossilized fish buried at the time of swallowing another fish
Fish caught in a catastrophic process while feeding
School of fish instantly buried in the chalk
It is clear that at once many fish could not die of old age.
Petrified leaves and tree branches also speak of this fast and catastrophic process.
preserved flower
ancient fern
Rock - like compressed clay
Geologists call it shell rock. Only in this organisms are preserved in the best possible way.
accumulation of ammonites. Upper Apt. Cherek River, Kabardino-Balkaria.
Shell nuclei of gastropods. Manyrak. Southern Prizaisanie
Brachiopods, bryozoans and trilobites. Early carbon. Eastern Betpakdala
Upper Cretaceous flora of Germany (Aachen), cones/fruits/leaves. Why not modern pine cones?
Also Upper Cretaceous flora of Germany (Aachen), cones/fruits/leaves. But the bumps are already wilder
Lobster fossil found in Canada
The classic of paleontology is the trilobite. Also from Canada
Crown of a small sea lily. The length of the stems of some adult specimens could reach 11 meters. These crinoids led a pseudoplanktonic lifestyle, attaching to drifting wood and forming settlements of up to 150 specimens. Upper Triassic, Carnian, Xiaowa Formation. Guangzhou Province, China. The length of the scale bar is 20 mm.
By the way, a very good fossil portal. Collected bank of photographs, perhaps, from all over the world.
The age of these fossils can be treated differently. But there are many facts that these organisms died as a result of the cataclysm (like dinosaurs).
Loading...