Missouri Ozarks fossil

[ThePhysicist]

Come on, folks. I thought this one was obvious.

 

 

In all seriousness, I have no idea. I think carefully removing some of the surrounding matrix could yield more clues. 

[westcoast]

13 minutes ago, ThePhysicist said:

Come on, folks. I thought this one was obvious.

 

 

In all seriousness, I have no idea. I think carefully removing some of the surrounding matrix could yield more clues. 

Quite brilliant!

[Ludwigia]

[Sagebrush Steve]

11 hours ago, Tidgy's Dad said:

Perhaps the spiralium was clean broken in half and the two halves then were pressed together and interlocked at that point before fossilization?

Just guessing and I too am very intrigued. 

That’s what I was thinking, too.  I was thinking of conducting an experiment in which I took a spring, laid it sideways and glued it along the bottom to a flat surface.  Then I would cut the top of the spirals with a metal cutting saw and see if they end up overlapping each other like this.  I’m not much of a biologist but engineering challenges excite me. 

[Rockwood]

22 minutes ago, Sagebrush Steve said:

engineering challenges excite me. 

This one should be exciting. Take some temper out of those springs and they'll cut easier. 

[Ozarkia]

More information and photos: I have been told that this area is a part of the Burlington Formation, if that helps. Somebody mentioned that it looks glossy or wet inside and that is probably an effect of some crystalization. It is probably 2.5 cm deep. The back end/bottom has no ridges. I am attaching a couple more photos which I think show the inside a little better but a bit blurry (I'm sorry, I did my best) and then one just of the top of the rock which somebody asked for. One of the photos shows that on the side opposite the interlocking"spine" there are a couple of curved c shaped "spines." They don't seem to run back further, just those two hanging out alone. 

 

I don't trust myself to mess with it too much by removing surrounding matrix or trying to make a mold. I would probably break it... We do have the Missouri Institute of Natural Science relatively close and if I can find the time, I may bring it in there and see if they have any ideas. Being able to manipulate it might help an expert to figure it out rather than relying on my photos.

 

I love the ideas above and would be very interested to hear the results of your spring experiment, Sagebrush Steve, if you go ahead with it!

[Earendil]

Once we figure this out, I would enter it into FOTM!!

[LabRatKing]

1 hour ago, Ozarkia said:

More information and photos: I have been told that this area is a part of the Burlington Formation, if that helps. Somebody mentioned that it looks glossy or wet inside and that is probably an effect of some crystalization. It is probably 2.5 cm deep. The back end/bottom has no ridges. I am attaching a couple more photos which I think show the inside a little better but a bit blurry (I'm sorry, I did my best) and then one just of the top of the rock which somebody asked for. One of the photos shows that on the side opposite the interlocking"spine" there are a couple of curved c shaped "spines." They don't seem to run back further, just those two hanging out alone. 

 

I don't trust myself to mess with it too much by removing surrounding matrix or trying to make a mold. I would probably break it... We do have the Missouri Institute of Natural Science relatively close and if I can find the time, I may bring it in there and see if they have any ideas. Being able to manipulate it might help an expert to figure it out rather than relying on my photos.

 

I love the ideas above and would be very interested to hear the results of your spring experiment, Sagebrush Steve, if you go ahead with it!

These photos were very helpful. I am all but certain this is preserved spirallia. While blurry, the left side interior of the fossil in the first picture cements it (pun intended). Looks like both valves meeting up to me. Additionally, that photo gives an unskewed view of the cross section. If that isn't a brachiopod looking profile, Ill eat my hat. (The felt one, dentures and leather don't mix...)

 

I believe the spirallia broke off, thus producing the interlaced looking pattern, and due to a nice calcite coating, appear so evenly rounded off.

[Ozarkia]

1 hour ago, LabRatKing said:

These photos were very helpful. I am all but certain this is preserved spirallia. While blurry, the left side interior of the fossil in the first picture cements it (pun intended). Looks like both valves meeting up to me. Additionally, that photo gives an unskewed view of the cross section. If that isn't a brachiopod looking profile, Ill eat my hat. (The felt one, dentures and leather don't mix...)

 

I believe the spirallia broke off, thus producing the interlaced looking pattern, and due to a nice calcite coating, appear so evenly rounded off.

Thank you! You sound very certain so I'm not going to make any wagers with you involving eating hats! That makes sense and now I am going to look up photos of spirallia so I can visualize this scenario better. Thanks so much again (and to everybody else who has spent time and commented!!!) 

[Sagebrush Steve]

6 hours ago, Rockwood said:

This one should be exciting. Take some temper out of those springs and they'll cut easier. 

Good point.  Here's my starting point:

 

 

And here's the one I will use:

 

 

Give me a few days and I'll report the results.

[Ludwigia]

10 hours ago, Sagebrush Steve said:

Give me a few days and I'll report the results.

[Sagebrush Steve]

On 3/1/2021 at 3:50 PM, Ozarkia said:

I’ve completed my experiment and will say the results answer some questions but leave others open.  As a reminder, the hypothesis that several people have offered is that this object in question is a brachidium that broke in half at the top and interlocked afterwards.  I decided to conduct an experiment to see whether I could reproduce such an effect using a spring.  My plan was to lay the spring sideways on a substrate and glue the bottom to the substrate, then cut the spirals at their tops to see if they would overlap like the object in question.

 

After a little thought, I concluded that if I just glued a spring down and cut the tops of the spirals, they wouldn’t move or overlap because there was no load on them.  So I decided to run the experiment on two springs, one uncompressed and one compressed.  Here are the two springs.  On the one spring I ran a machine screw through it and tightened it down to compress it by 25%.

 

 

 

 

I then placed the two springs on a scrap piece of aluminum I had laying around.  Notice that on the compressed spring, I used short lengths of fine wire to hold the screw to the top of the spring to keep it for getting accidentally glued to the epoxy that would be laid down on the aluminum.

 

Here’s a closeup of the compressed spring after the glue set up overnight.  I removed the wires and the alligator clip before cutting the spirals.

 

I just used diagonal cutters to cut the tops of the springs.

 

Here’s what the uncompressed spring looks like after cutting.  As I expected, there was little relative movement between the two sides.

 

Here’s what the compressed spring looks like after cutting.  As I predicted, the two sides are offset from one another by about 25%, which is what I would expect given that the spring constant of a spring is a linear function of the amount of compression.

 

The one thing that is noticeably different from the object in question is that while the two sides are offset linearly, they don’t extend past each other like in the object in question.  My prediction is that if I ran one more test in which I applied rotational stress to the spring instead of (or in addition to) linear compression, I would see something very similar to the object in question.

I’m going to stop here, but if there are any youth members of the forum who are looking for a high school science project to enter into a science fair (I suppose those won’t happen until the pandemic is over), repeating this experiment and taking it to the next step of including a spring under rotational stress could be a good project.  Of course this still wouldn’t be sufficient to convince us this is what the object in question is, you would also have to determine whether it is reasonable to expect that a brachidium could be under rotational or compressive stress.  But I suppose you could use this as the basis for a Ph.D. dissertation if you were creative enough (spoken by someone who does not have a Ph.D., which hardly makes me an expert!).

 

 

 

[LabRatKing]

Great experiment, however I think it is important  to consider the full structure of the spirallia (done fighting autocorrect ) and the nature of the preservation.

 

 

 

 I’m thinking something along the lines of orientation of A, with the “bottom” buried in the calcite.

 

 

 

 

[Rockwood]

On 3/4/2021 at 7:26 PM, Sagebrush Steve said:

And here's the one I will use:

Oh! I was thinking of a spring. You know, that thing under the fender, or over the garage door.

I prefer not to think of these little ones. Too many memories of searching the workshop floor for the one that operates a Brigs+ Stratton carburetor float valve.  

Oops. Make that diaphragm valve in a chain saw. 

[Sagebrush Steve]

56 minutes ago, Rockwood said:

Oh! I was thinking of a spring. You know, that thing under the fender, or over the garage door.

I prefer not to think of these little ones. Too many memories of searching the workshop floor for the one that operates a Brigs+ Stratton carburetor float valve.  

I was thinking of one about the size of what you would find in a brachiopod.  Unless you know something about brachiopods I don’t. 

[LabRatKing]

2 hours ago, Rockwood said:

Oh! I was thinking of a spring. You know, that thing under the fender, or over the garage door.

I prefer not to think of these little ones. Too many memories of searching the workshop floor for the one that operates a Brigs+ Stratton carburetor float valve.  

Oops. Make that diaphragm valve in a chain saw. 

Or the linkage spring on dual carbs... been there lost that too!

[Sagebrush Steve]

5 hours ago, LabRatKing said:

Great experiment, however I think it is important  to consider the full structure of the spirallia (done fighting autocorrect ) and the nature of the preservation.

 

 

 

 I’m thinking something along the lines of orientation of A, with the “bottom” buried in the calcite.

 

 

 

 

 

Okay, here you go.  Where should I send these so you can continue the experiment? But seriously (at least as seriously as it's possible for me to get), if anyone wants to continue the experiment let me know and I can mail the springs to you (USA postage paid only).  But you would have to promise to report your results in a timely manner.

 

[Rockwood]

1 hour ago, Sagebrush Steve said:

thinking

The problem.

Insufficient on my part.