Spectacular Images of Ancient Life


Exceptionally preserved fossils of long-extinct animals represent another convergence of Life (the jump of imagination to picturing the live animals is greatly reduced by the state of preservation), Art (the fossils are often aesthetically beautiful) and Earth (they are part of the geological record).

X-radiograph of Helianthaster rhenanus, 12 cm across, showing 14 arms, from the Devonian of Bundenbach


One ever-popular group of extinct animals, the trilobites, are only very rarely preserved with their limbs and antennae intact and even more occasionally show preservation of their soft guts. A page of such examples, ranging in age from Early Cambrian to Late Devonian (a number of these being the best examples known) can be seen here: The Whole Trilobite.

Some of my favourite occurrences of exceptional fossil preservation are:

-       - the Devonian slates around the town of Bundenbach in Germany, where astonishing details are captured in pyrite, allowing the preparation of astonishing X-radiographs

A complete 37 cm pycnogonid (sea spider) from the Devonian of Bundenbach

-       - the Cretaceous platy limestones of Lebanon in which very early precipitation of calcium phosphate preserved even the fine anatomical details of ancient octopus corpses

This complete Cretaceous octopus shows remarkable preservation of internal anatomy


-       - the diverse biotas encapsulated in amber, from Cretaceous and Cenozoic rocks

This is probably the most spectacular Cretaceous mantis known, 27 mm long in Burmese amber

There are many more cases, spanning more than half a billion years of Earth history and from time to time a new "Window onto the past" is discovered. I find this one of the most satisfying areas of the Earth sciences.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stone axes from the highlands of Papua New Guinea

Image
The story of first contact in 1933 with the peoples of the central Wahgi Valley in the Papuan highlands is a remarkable one. An unsuspected group of thriving stone-age cultures came to the attention of the outside world when the Leahy brothers first flew over the area and later reached it on foot. Tribal men carried elaborate stone axes and this contact with extant stone-age cultures provided fascinating insights on how their stone tools, such as axes and adzes were hafted. The available evidence was collated in Burton's (1984) Thesis at the Australia National University, on "AXE MAKERS OF THE WAHGI: Pre-colonial industrialists of the Papua New Guinea highlands." I saw a number of these old axes during a visit to the highlands near Mount Hagen in October 2018 (see the Paiya chief photograph below). The area of that journey is shown in the google Earth image shown below. The upper Wahgi River valley with locations of Paiya Village, Mount Giluwe and Mount Hagen t
Read more

A Merovingian Croix Ancrée Tremissis, Sutton Hoo, and Declining Gold Content in the 7th Century Coinage

Image
In the recent Netflix film "The Dig" there is a scene in which Basil Brown's character shows a small gold coin, known as a tremissis, to Edith Pretty, confirming that the ship burial at Sutton Hoo is of Anglo Saxon age as he had previously suspected. A Merovingian tremissis found in Kent, 10 mm across 37 such coins, all from Merovingian Francia, were found at Sutton Hoo, associated with the remains of an elaborate purse. These coins have commanded a great deal of attention as a potential means to constrain the date of the burial. This is a highly imprecise process (the coins are not datable to within a range shorter than 16 years), relying on recognising issues associated with known rulers, identifying the youngest of these, speculating from there as to how much younger the undated coins may be, and then how much later the assembled group was deposited in the ship burial. Plan of  the Sutton Hoo Mound 1 burial chamber in Burger et al (2016), combined from versions by Phil
Read more

From Nike, Winged Goddess of Victory, to an Angel in Three Coins

Image
A winged goddess of victory has been a widespread image over the past two and a half millennia. Here I illustrate her transformation from Greek goddess to Roman goddess to Christian angel with three coins spanning a period of about 900 years.  She, Nike , appears in Archaic form in a statue from Delos , dating to the 6th century BCE and found in front of the old Temple of Artemis in 1887. A famous 5th century BCE sculpture of Nike by Paionios was found at Olympia in 1875 and the even more famous Winged Victory of Samothrace , dating to the second century BCE, was found in 1863. Nike also appeared on coins and a beautiful ancient Greek example from the fourth century BCE shows this winged goddess of victory carrying a wreath and a naval stylis (what appears to be a staff with angled trident head).   Reverse of gold stater of Alexander III (The Great), Ake mint, dating to 308/9 BCE, showing Nike with wreath in right hand and stylis in left hand. In her later Roman guise as the goddess
Read more