Name The Fossil!!
Okay, I have no idea if I've shown this thing here before....please forgive me if I have. Basically, I want to find out what this is.
I found this thing in my yard back when I was a kid...some rough neighborhood kids had been throwing rocks at a metal outbuilding in our back yard and I suspect that one of them stole it from somewhere and used it for target practice. It left a bit of a dent in the side of the "tin house" as I recall. It's obviously sedimentary inside, so no I do not think that it's a meteorite.
I've scanned the thing in at high-res so you can see it up-close (look for those links below the thumbnails I'm including here). If you cut through the thing and looked at it in cross-section you'd find that the sides I've labeled 1 and 2 are the long sides, I did not scan the curved "fat" portion of the teardrop shape. Scan #3 is interesting. It's down a scan of the "bottom" of the piece and you can see that there's a little tag that projects beyond the sedimentary infill, as if the stippled pattern on the outside were some kind of skin (plant or animal) that was draped back onto itself.
Take a look. Hook your geologist and paleontologist friends into this discussion. Leonis should be quick to grab that texture for his animations. Ta!
Click here to view a MUCH larger view of SIDE 1
Click here to view a MUCH larger view of SIDE 2
Click here to view a MUCH larger view of The BOTTOM
I found this thing in my yard back when I was a kid...some rough neighborhood kids had been throwing rocks at a metal outbuilding in our back yard and I suspect that one of them stole it from somewhere and used it for target practice. It left a bit of a dent in the side of the "tin house" as I recall. It's obviously sedimentary inside, so no I do not think that it's a meteorite.
I've scanned the thing in at high-res so you can see it up-close (look for those links below the thumbnails I'm including here). If you cut through the thing and looked at it in cross-section you'd find that the sides I've labeled 1 and 2 are the long sides, I did not scan the curved "fat" portion of the teardrop shape. Scan #3 is interesting. It's down a scan of the "bottom" of the piece and you can see that there's a little tag that projects beyond the sedimentary infill, as if the stippled pattern on the outside were some kind of skin (plant or animal) that was draped back onto itself.
Take a look. Hook your geologist and paleontologist friends into this discussion. Leonis should be quick to grab that texture for his animations. Ta!
Click here to view a MUCH larger view of SIDE 1
Click here to view a MUCH larger view of SIDE 2
Click here to view a MUCH larger view of The BOTTOM
Comments
Originally posted by k squared
I like Eugene's thread better.
Oh, okay, his "special" thread. Yes, but that's not a fossil - that's a HOTTIE. Big diff.
What about this rock then guys?
maybe an artifact. the regularly spaced holes are bizarre.
For example: http://www.sierra.cc.ca.us/museum/treefern.htm
http://www.mdgekko.com/devonian/who/pages/lycopsid.html
http://www.snomnh.ou.edu/COLLECTIONS...bot/Lycops.htm
p.s. She wants to know what part of the world you found it in.
Note how it's not an imprint, that's *both sides* of a wall.
Sea sponges have that form, and show the same patterns inside and out.
obviously
Originally posted by Influenza
According to a paleontologist friend of mine, "It looks like a lycopsid, a giant tree fern trunk. They have those regularly spaced holes because that's where the leaves were attached. Either that or a coral, but it looks too regular to be a coral."
[snip]
p.s. She wants to know what part of the world you found it in.
Well I thought that I'd found it in my backyard, where some hoodlum neighborhood kids had been regularly throwing rocks at the little corrugated aluminum out-building that my Dad keeps his lawnmower in....always said that's where we found it...but my Dad jut told me that I found it down in the swamp down behind our house. (No, it isn't a Cthulhu statuette guys)
Either way, that place would be the environs around Atlanta, Georgia.
It would be awesome if it were dinosaur skin, but I think your friend is probably correct. I should try taking it to someplace here in the Atlanta area....perhaps Fernbank Museum.
Ooooo, er, or a sea sponge.
Well, I really ought to take it to be looked at by a paleobotanist some day - it could even be an as-yet unidentified species....
Hrm. Let me know if she knows any PB's in the Atlanta area.
Originally posted by BR
Strom Thurmond.
That would be a lot funnier if he wasn't dead.