As today is Earth Day I thought I would post a photo of a rock that we found on our property that has an impression of part of a plant that was quite common in the Carboniferous era some 300 to 360 million years past.
I don't know the specific plant species that left this impression although it seems to fit the LYCOSPIDA family.
We have found a number of rocks that show similar impressions but often just a small section rather than this one which is just on 20cm in length.
What a wonderful find :) I have quite a collection of fossils - find them (and the History of Life) just fascinating. Only found a few myself though and not in our garden!
ReplyDeleteIt is amazing to find evidence of things that existed millions of years past. As a child I read in the encyclopedia about fossil finds and thought it would be great to find a dinosaur fossil. Well not to be but even a humble plant impression is exciting. One of the memorable parts of our UK trip was seeing the fossils in the Natural History Museum and reading about Mary Anning and her find of a complete Ichthyosaur fossil among the many other finds she made which eared her the title as "The Fossil Woman."
DeleteOnly this week the largest fossil tooth found in Austrlia was picked up on a Melbourne beach.It was 30cm long and from a giant sperm whale that lived some 5 million years ago.