Ken Jones Posted October 18, 2014 Share Posted October 18, 2014 Hi all, I have sent photos of this structure and another one that I came across to scientist and have been told that this one is a conodont but the other one, no one has been able to ID as of yet. This one here I found in a dish with some fragments that I had broken off from the bottom of the rock, the other one I scrapped out of a hole in the rock. I had a palaeontologist ask me to place the two specimen next to something to gage scale and in the process, I ended up loosing the conodont but I do still have the worm-like fossil. These things just do not look like what I think of as a fossil found in a rock, they are not embedded in the rock and they have color, they don't appear to have been compressed in sediments nor do they look as if they were made from any type of sediment. There was no prep involved at all, the way you see them in the photos is the way they were found. These fossils are smaller than a grain of sand, they can not be seen with the naked eye at all, I apologize for not being able to show scale on this one, the other one I had an edx analysis done and the edx photo does give some ideal of the scale. No matter what I read about fossils, I can not understand what I'm looking at when I look at these fossils, I simple can not find anything in writing that can explain why these fossils look the way they do. These photos were taken with a digital microscope at 40x - 400x. Thank you, Ken Jones Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tmaier Posted October 18, 2014 Share Posted October 18, 2014 I don't think it is conodont, because the articulation joint does not resemble any conodont I've seen. http://www.google.com/images?q=conodont&btnG=Search&hl=en&gbv=1&spell=1 Arthropod tibia? http://www.google.com/images?q=arthopod+appendage&btnG=Search&hl=en&gbv=1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
erose Posted October 18, 2014 Share Posted October 18, 2014 What Age? Reminds me of some graptolite forms from the Ordovician. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tmaier Posted October 19, 2014 Share Posted October 19, 2014 (edited) If you find a fossil in a rock that ranged from 485 mya to 200 million years ago, what does that say about the age of the rock? Can one assume that the rock itself was formed between 485 to 200 million years ago? Mostly yes... When a fossil is found in a rock then the sediment was most likely laid down within the time of the existence of that creature. So if you found a conodont in a rock, then the sediment must have been laid down when conodonts exited. Dating a rock with that method is called using "index fossils". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_fossil The only time that the index fossil might be lying to you is when it becomes washed out of its original strata and is redeposited into a fresh, new sediment. Then it looks like the fossil is in the wrong time period. You will have a young sediment layer with older fossils in it. One other source of error is when live organisms dig into cracks and crannies of rock and their modern remains are mistaken for fossils. So when you are collecting the fossils you need to be sure that you don't get modern debris in the specimens you collect. This is especially a problem when dealing with micro fossils. Conodonts are a whole Class of organisms that went extinct and that Class lived over a long span of time (almost 300 million years). If you can identify a genus or species that the conodont belonged to, then you can often narrow down that long time span to a few million years, making the fossil a more accurate "index" of time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conodont Edited October 19, 2014 by tmaier 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ludwigia Posted November 1, 2014 Share Posted November 1, 2014 Where did you find or aquire your pyrite rock originally? Greetings from the Lake of Constance. Roger http://www.steinkern.de/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Auspex Posted November 4, 2014 Share Posted November 4, 2014 NOTE: In another thread, this topic has been revealed to be either delusional or a hoax. "There has been an alarming increase in the number of things I know nothing about." - Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” - Thomas Henry Huxley >Paleontology is an evolving science. >May your wonders never cease! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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