Stromatolites

[tracer]

well, i like the response to the topic and the additional pieces to look at. i spend quite a bit of time daydreaming about what things were like in the past and trying to visualize everything. pushing my contemplations back to the "primordial ooze" sort of concepts adds to the flavor of it all for me.

[Auspex]

The Wikipedia article <click here> has photos of living colonies in Australia.

[ashcraft]

The thing that I find most fascinating is how Nature repeats itself with different building blocks, in this case reefs. Modern reefs are mostly formed by modern corals, but go back to pre-permian extinction, they were often formed by the extinct, and probably not closely related, ancient corals. Reefs have also been formed by a number of other organisms such as shellfish, but most notably stramatolites. We have huge reefs dating to the Ordovician in this area, sometimes interred snails are found inside. I can only imagine that these reefs looked eerily similar to our modern reefs, with different organisms filling similar niches, like cephs filling large predators and sharks filling bony fish roles.

Brent Ashcraft