Found a weird rock with a fossil I didn't expect

I was walking the dog along the creek bed in Mill Creek Park yesterday, and I kicked over this flat, gray rock. It looked like slate, but when I flipped it, there was a perfect spiral shape pressed into it. I took a picture and looked it up when I got home. Turns out it's called an ammonite, and it's not a snail shell like I thought, but an extinct sea creature related to squid. The crazy part is, this area is landlocked Ohio, nowhere near an ocean. The article said the whole region was covered by a shallow sea about 400 million years ago. I'm holding a piece of that sea floor in my hand. It's wild to think about how much the land has changed. Has anyone else found fossils in a place that seems totally wrong for them?

3 comments

3 Comments

elizabeths517d ago

A shallow sea over Ohio is the kind of fact that just breaks my brain for a minute. You're holding proof the whole MAP was different. That's way cooler than my cousin's arrowhead collection. Nature just leaves its old blueprints lying around for us to trip over.

the_jennifer7d ago

Isn't it funny how we get so excited over a weird rock? Elizabeths51, you're right about the map being different. I'd love to see the look on some ancient fish's face if it knew we'd be getting chills from its old seafloor. My garden is full of limestone chunks, and I always tell myself they're little souvenirs from a beach vacation that happened 400 million years too early.

susan6498d ago

My backyard in Indiana is basically a gravel pit, and I once spent a whole afternoon convinced I'd found a dinosaur tooth. It was just a weird shaped piece of a deer antler (which, to be fair, I also did not expect to find). That feeling of holding ancient history is amazing, though. It really does make your brain bend trying to picture an ocean over Cincinnati.