021919d

placoderms sizzling

in my Devonian skillet

wishing for butter

and lemons

A fossil reef

A solid mass of finger shaped fossil corals composing a reef, Devonian of upstate New York. The reef is the size of a small hill; this is a very small part of it.

They were like sponges

This is an overturned silicified stromatoporoid in the Devonian Manlius Limestone in upstate New York. The stromatoporoid is not the little black thing at the end of the finger; it is the blobby object in the middle of the field of view. Stromatoporoids have been extinct for hundreds of millions of years, but they appear to have been a lot like sponges. They lived in warm shallow water, couldn't move around, and were structurally very simple. This one had some bad luck one day. Something, perhaps a storm, turned it upside down and it got buried in mud. Later, it was partly turned to silica (the major component in glass and the most abundant mineral near the Earth's surface). The silica is the lighter yellowish squiggly stuff inside the stromatoporoid.

Breaking Rock

Actually, this rock broke back in the Devonian Period. The white stuff is gypsum, which filled the spaces among the pieces of shattered rock, forming a new fabric and creating an altered rock that is called breccia. The light gray layer underneath is much older. It is Ordovician, and the surface in between represents an immense amount of time. This kind of surface is called an unconformity.

reminds me of "The Puppet Masters"

But these are real, less than 1 µm across, composed of pyrite, and clinging to the surface of an opening in Devonian shale collected more than 10,000 feet below the surface of the Earth. They're pretty cool, but I'm also looking for professional opinions from any who feel qualified to make them.

snake one and snake two

The whole thing is about 45 µm wide; less than 0.05 mm.