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Fossil Hornet Nest


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OK here is the story.

There was a very large granite bolder on my property and it had resisted many attempts to move it but finally someone brought in a bulldozer big enough and it was moved to a more convenient place. In the process of moving it a large fossil was exposed. It was notable for the many hexagonal structures which looked like a bee hive. Everyone agreed it was very curious and obviously a fossil but not more than that. I wish I had a piece of it but the whole thing would have weighed 50 pounds or more.

 

Many years later I was watching a program about ground nesting wasps and hornets. When I saw that the light went off. That was a fossil hornet nest. How long would it take to fossilize something like that? Could it have been under that large bolder, had the entrance blocked off and been sealed off long enough to fossilize?

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The fossilization process takes a really long time and even if that was a wasp nest it would likely not have originated under that boulder and stayed there.

I also doubt that the item you found is a wasp nest as they are very fragile structures that do not fossilize well, I know that Favosites sp. Coral is often mistaken for hymenoptera nests, it could be that. 

It is really hard to tell what you had without any kind of visual reference, but one thing that could help is the location as that can tell us the age of the fossils found in a region, if any.

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Something like Favosites, would be my guess.

 

IMAGES.

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To add; A hornet nest is made when they chew wood and spit it out so its a mixture of wood and spit. So therefore if one were to be fossilized it would probably be similar to petrified wood. That being said, petrified wood occurs to dense pieces of wood and a hornets nest would most likely be compressed and not hold form so you would just get a blob. This is by no means a fact, just my two cents. :D

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