A view of Utah's Grand Staircase Escalante desert region, with light colored sandstone in foreground containing large round sauropod tracks as if recently squished in the mud. Beautiful rust & red colored rocks & diffs are in the background.
For #FossilFriday the Twenty Mile Wash Dinosaur Track Site near Escalante, which has hundreds of theropod & sauropod dinosaur trackway #ichnofossils, left during Jurassic around 155 million years ago 🦕🦖 ⚒️ #paleosky
I've found 2 of these #ichnofossils, now. The first one I found is hollow and not pictured. They appear to be zoological and not an artifact. #photography There are several pictures of the same object from different angles.
A woman in a black rain jacket and glasses excitedly holds a large yellow spotted salamander in the palm of her cupped hands. She’s standing in a forest with leaf litter behind her.
A hand holds up a piece of rock with raised lines across its surface, ichnofossils from Paleozoic aged animals. The rock is slightly yellow-green and went from the shallow stream it was in, visible in the background.
The tall straight trunks of a forest tower above the camera, leaves just starting to grow on a cloudy, overcast spring day. Moss covers a log in the foreground, the forest floor covered in reddish-brown decaying leaves.
could have been studying, instead went searching for #salamanders
(and Devonian #ichnofossils)
A small flat irregularly shaped slab of buff-beige rock bears numerous thin thread-like markings in the form of criss-crossing sinusoidal trails. Most of the trails are slightly darker brown in colour, but some are very faint. A scale bar at the bottom of the image is 30 mm long.
A close-up view of the central part of the main image, showing many thread-like trails crossing each other. The sinuous impressions vary from shallow and faint to slightly deeper and darker -- all are less than 1 mm in width.
Continuing with #ichnofossils for #WormWednesday! These tiny sinuous trails were left by #nematodes ("roundworms") moving across fine carbonate muds at the margin of a large lake. Cochlichnus sp. cf. C. anguineus -- Green River Fm #Eocene (~50 MYA) -- Utah #trace #fossils (scale bar = 30 mm)
A roughly rectangular slab of light grey siltstone carries a number of irregularly curving to straight bilobate structures in positive relief. These may vary along their length from narrow (< 1 cm)and "beaded" in appearance, to broad (1.5 cm) and "ropy" with indistinct chevron-like segments. The slabs measures approximately 20 cm x 40 cm.
It's #MolluscMonday & I'm keeping to my #trace #fossil theme. Protovirgularia from the #Carboniferous (~310 MYA) of Kansas are interpreted as the "ropy" locomotory & deposit feeding trails of protobranch #bivalve #molluscs in a tidally influenced shallow marine sea. #ichnofossils
Flare face of sedimentary rock near a beach surrounded by fencing
Sedimentary beds of rock dipping to the right on a beach with raised land of a peninsula in the background
Coarse sand made entirely of tiny seashells and she'll fragments in the palm of a left hand
#FossilFriday I made a purely touristic visit to the Trachilos trackway site while in Crete a few weeks ago. The main tracks are covered, but it was still cool to get to see the location of this famous site in person, and the view from it is lovely! #ichnofossils #paleontology
happy #FossilFriday! I’m emotional about #ichnofossils and #ichnology again
100% agree -- #ichnofossils are crucial components of the record of life ... essentially behaviour frozen in time! A bit of a side passion for me, too, so I'll explore more over the next week. And thank goodness for folks like @ichnologist.bsky.social who give us the big picture!
#Ichnofossils record activity of ancient organisms & provide clues about behaviour, but the identity of the trace-maker isn't always clear. This is Arthrophycus - a complex corrugated feeding burrow system excavated in a #Silurian (~435 MYA) seabed, likely by an arthropod. #Ontario 🇨🇦 #FossilFriday
A photograph showing fossilized dinosaur footprints along a rock face surrounded by bushes, on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Portugal.
For #FossilFriday, here's my favourite type of fossil: ichnofossils! The Natural Monument of Lagosteiros has some fabulous dinosaur footprints in a beautiful corner of Portugal right on the ocean.
#ichnofossils #Prehistoric #Portugal
Read more here: prehistoricportugal.com/2023/11/lago...
