• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Does anyone know what this is?

Roma

Master Poster
Roma
Joined
Aug 6, 2008
Messages
2,073
This was picked up on the West Coast of Newfoundland, Canada, at Port-Aux-Port Penninsula.

It is a fossil of some sort, not an etching or drawing. It is about the size of a thumb.

 
Last edited:
Had to click it to get a little clearer look. And while it looks spookily like a teenie weenie dinosaur or alien, it really just looks like some igneous rock that happens to have formed and left some convenient lines that make it look like something else. I'm no archaelogist, but wouldn't a fossil be of different color/texture, and not a line drawing?

IMHO, It's para-whatchamacallit. Like Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich.
 
Is the rock it is in crumbly at all, like rubbing it with your finger wears away any grains or dust?
 
Roma Hart said:
This was picked up on the West Coast of Newfoundland, Canada, at Port-Aux-Port Penninsula.

It is a fossil of some sort, not an etching or drawing. It is about the size of a thumb.
Click to expand...
It is a fossilised baby Zarbi.



Yuri

ps. They used to frighten the living daylights out of me when I was young.
 
Last edited:
A tunicate? A sponge? The [much deformed] cephalon of a trilobite? Dunno.
It's difficult to tell anything from that photo.

On second thoughts. Are you sure it actually is a fossil and not just an inclusion?
The sample looks sort of like some kind of conglomerate.
 
Last edited:
I vote Pareidolia. I wouldn't hazard a guess about how the markings arose without knowing a hole lot more about the type of rock.
 
Dancing David said:
That is a hard one to say, sure doesn't look like the fossils we find here.

What type of rock is it?
Click to expand...

Well Port-Aux-Port Penninsula turns up a lot of arthropod fossils from around the Cambrian period. Being an optimist, it could be a fossil.

The structure showing must be treated with a sense of pareidolia because I am almost certain nothing had evolved yet that would create an impression that looks like those sort of eyes, or the quirky smile lol
 
It's a tablecloth.

You know there's a good geology museum in St. John's?
 
Look daddy, that cloud looks like a dolphin.

Look mummy, that mountain is the shape of Queen Victoria.

EOS.

TAM:)
 
Yes, but a Pareidolia paper weight !

Thanks everyone, unless there's some one else out there that thinks it is something else, I'll take that as the answer. Too bad, my friend thought for sure it was a baby alien. ;)
 
What kind of rock is it? If it looks like slate or shale, it might be a fossil or the stone surrounding a fossil layer, but since a lot of fossil material is not much more than mud soup, it can be hard to identify anything. If it looks more like compressed mud or sandstone, it could be a concretion. We get a lot of those in Lake Champlain. Some of them look like that, and others have holes in them like buttons. If you can think of a mud ball or splatter itself becoming fossilized, that's more or less what a concretion is. If it's more glassy or igneous looking, one possibility is slag. I don't know about the Maritimes, but slag from the old colonial iron works is found widely distributed around New England, where it was often broken up and used in rail beds and for land fill.

Of course none of those possibilities addresses the shape, which is probably best summed up as a pareidolia paper weight.
 
It does not really look like a fossil. It is all outline with no detail.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom