microscope image of a fossil that looks like a grey and black fluffy button with a dark outer rim composed of overlapping ovoid plates. There is a red scale bar indicating the fossil is 70 microns long, or 0.07 mm

#FossilFriday one of the new 3.2 billion year old #acritarchs we recovered from the Moodies Group. So far we have hundreds of these things and they preserve some amazing details. #Geology #Paleontology

#FossilFriday here's one of the samples in thin section. The dark blobs are the #acritarchs. The brown is biotite, and the green is chlorite and hornblende. So the rock has experienced both pro- and retrograde #metamorphism #geology #paleontology 🧪⚒️

Acanthomorph #acritarchs be like...

SEM-EDS image of black microfossils that look like shriveled raisins, on a pale grey surface of mud that has a polygonal cracked pattern. The microfossils are still partly enclosed in the mud. A scale bar in the bottom right shows 20 microns meaning the image is around 0.2 mm wide.

#Precambrian #acritarchs on a mudstone bedding plane. This acritarch is commonly found as these aggregates where the individuals are curled around each other. Note that they are will partially buried, and intruded by an acicular mineral grain on the right. #FossilFriday #Geology #Paleontology

electron microscope image of false coloured red pancake like microfossils on a false coloured turqouise mudstone that is made of lots of tiny grains. Below this is a black line sketch of the fossils in the same colours as above.

A belated #FossilFriday Some #Precambrian #acritarchs on a mudstone bedding plane. Red = organic carbon, turquoise = clay (SEM-EDS and Raman data). Below that is a trace with a schematic cross section showing how the fossils relate to bedding. #Sciart #Geology #paleontology ⚒️

Microscope photo of a glass slide covered in microfossils that look like black and brown dots and wiggles. This is 4x mag and the field of view is ~6 mm

Microscope photo of the same glass slide from the previous photo. The micro fossils can be resolved as black grading to light brown flattened spheres and ovoids, clusters of spheres, banded tubes, and irregularly shaped fuzzy lumps. This is 10x mag and the field of view is ~2.3 mm

Microscope photo of the same glass slide from the previous photo. Some of the sphere and ovoid microfossils can be resolved to have different styles of wrinkles and folds on their outer surface, and some have a central dark dot inside. The irregular fuzzy lumps are made of masses of tangled tiny filaments. Field of view is ~1.15 mm

Microscope photo of the same glass slide from the previous photo. Focus on two of the fossils. The left hand fossil is composed of three light brown ovoid cells with thick folds along their length, and which contain square pyrite crystals. The right hand fossil is large dark brown ovoid that looks like a raisin, with a thick fold along it's outer rim, and smaller sinuous folds inside. There are also two clumps of dark brown microbial mat lumps made of tangled filaments. This is 40x mag, and the field of view is ~ 0.56 mm.

#FossilFriday Many Proterozoic #acritarchs from an acid extraction on a palyno slide. Each image is the same slide but at increasing mag. Each shape in view is either an acritarch #fossil, or a lump of microbial mat composed of fossil filaments. #Geology #Paleontology