Fossil Rock
This is for the group "Macro Mondays", which had the theme "Rocks" this week.
So I went out and picked up a piece of limestone in the creek. Since this is Cincinnati Ohio USA, the rock was loaded with fossils.
This photo was done using reverse-lens-macro, and focus stacking. You see the bony parts of some coral-like animals (which we call Bryozoans en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryozoa) and the long skinny thing is part of a Crinoid stem from a Crinoid plant en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crinoid#/media/File:Haeckel_Crinoid...
Below, in comments, I show a larger area of the rock, so you can see the surroundings of the extreme-macro shot. This larger area is also a macro shot, and it shows about two inches of the rock surface.
Also in comments is another reverse-lens-macro shot of another tiny area of the rock.
This Southern Ohio area of the US (and most of the USA) used to be a shallow ocean, way back in the Ordovician era. When the millions of tons of sea life slowly died, over the eons, and drifted to the bottom of the ocean, it gradually became fossilized.
Over time, the other geological eras came to be, each one depositing its own layers of life detritus, and mineralization creating rock layers, and fossils.
There are Ordovician sea fossils over most of the world, but they are buried under tons of rock which formed above them, over the ~450 million years which came after.
However, the entire area under Cincinnati and surrounding areas of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, was, at some point, pushed up from below, so that the layers of rock bulged upwards in an arc.
Then, over other millions of years, glaciers came down from the north and scraped the whole top of the bulge away. What was revealed was the earlier geological eras' rock layers. The oldest revealed layer is where Cincinnati is located. So nearly any sedimentary rock you pick up in this area will be loaded with fossils from animals who lived between 485 and 443 millions years ago.
That is one of the reasons I love living here.
Fossil Rock
This is for the group "Macro Mondays", which had the theme "Rocks" this week.
So I went out and picked up a piece of limestone in the creek. Since this is Cincinnati Ohio USA, the rock was loaded with fossils.
This photo was done using reverse-lens-macro, and focus stacking. You see the bony parts of some coral-like animals (which we call Bryozoans en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryozoa) and the long skinny thing is part of a Crinoid stem from a Crinoid plant en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crinoid#/media/File:Haeckel_Crinoid...
Below, in comments, I show a larger area of the rock, so you can see the surroundings of the extreme-macro shot. This larger area is also a macro shot, and it shows about two inches of the rock surface.
Also in comments is another reverse-lens-macro shot of another tiny area of the rock.
This Southern Ohio area of the US (and most of the USA) used to be a shallow ocean, way back in the Ordovician era. When the millions of tons of sea life slowly died, over the eons, and drifted to the bottom of the ocean, it gradually became fossilized.
Over time, the other geological eras came to be, each one depositing its own layers of life detritus, and mineralization creating rock layers, and fossils.
There are Ordovician sea fossils over most of the world, but they are buried under tons of rock which formed above them, over the ~450 million years which came after.
However, the entire area under Cincinnati and surrounding areas of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, was, at some point, pushed up from below, so that the layers of rock bulged upwards in an arc.
Then, over other millions of years, glaciers came down from the north and scraped the whole top of the bulge away. What was revealed was the earlier geological eras' rock layers. The oldest revealed layer is where Cincinnati is located. So nearly any sedimentary rock you pick up in this area will be loaded with fossils from animals who lived between 485 and 443 millions years ago.
That is one of the reasons I love living here.