Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: Ben on January 01, 2023, 10:07:54 AM
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Neat website showing the location of your house (well, the city it's in) in geologic past:
https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#240
There's a bunch of other neat stuff to look up as well.
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I haven't really researched it but I have seafloor fossils up here in the mountains. At least 300 million years old.
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I had no idea my little town existed 250 million years ago. I knew it was old, but I didn't know it was that old.
This must be a stable part of the continent, because it apparently hasn't moved in 250 million years.
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Kind of surprising that my area in Virginia has been above water for pretty much the entirety of the time shown on that map.
500 million years ago it was very close to being beach front property...
OK, 540 million years ago I'd have been swimming.
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I looked my house up in the Cretaceous. No surprise- we were just offshore. It is kind of a neat environment for fossils around here. We have marine fossils, but it is possible to find land fossils mixed with them as well. Fossil driftwood is easy to find; some years ago a fossil hadrosaur was discovered nearby... it apparently had been washed out to sea!
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Not a tremendous amount of fossils in this area of Virginia, at least not really accessible ones. This area is Piedmont, and is a lot of sedimentary overburden from the decay of the Appalachian mountains. Basically lots of clay shot through with quartz nodules and a lot of other igneous rocks below that, like granite and schist.
Essentially, this area was on the front line of the Laurasian landmass's split from Africa in the Triassic and Jurassic period, or about 220 million years ago.
It's a lot different here than it was in Central Pennsylvania where I grew up. There there are LOTS of fossil beds. Around 400 million years ago that area was under a vast shallow inland sea, which gave Pennsylvania its head start in coal deposits and the vast layers of limestone that underlie much of the eastern part of the state.
There was a shale quarry in the western part of my county that had an incredible number of fossils, including some beautiful trilobites.
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Can find lots of trilobites fossils in the hills surrounding Louisville
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From the same time period as the ones found in Pennsylvania, all part of the vast inland sea that covered much of the United States at the time.
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Climate Change! We're All Gonna Die!
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Trilobites farts
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Neat website showing the location of your house (well, the city it's in) in geologic past:
https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#240
There's a bunch of other neat stuff to look up as well.
Under water about half the time.
The Mazon Creek fossil beds are a couple hours from here.
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The St. Louis area was underwater until 280 MYA and was just north of the Equator. It was still south of the Equator until then.
Oddly enough, at 240 MYA, it was back south and then back north at 220 MYA.
At 66 M, there was a spike of the ocean that reached the Missouri bootheel and the southern tip of Illinois but not St. Louis, but did make it there at 50 MYA.