Dr Abe V Rotor
Living with Nature School on Blog
Paaralang Bayan sa Himpapawid with Ms Melly C Tenorio
738 DZRB AM, evening class 8 to 9, Monday to Friday.
Author examines fossil of giant brain coral, Santa, Ilocos Sur
Petrified Wood
Fossil of Giant Staghorn Coral
Around
the fossil are many fossils of small organisms, other corals and
shells. Fossils are known by their total age by combining the age of the
fossil itself and the age of the surrounding rock.
Legends
are rich in stories of the supernatural when gods do the impossible to
the awe and fear of mortals, such as turning man into rock. Or wood into
rock. For who would deny the markings of every tissue of the demised
tree - its xylem vessels, phloem which carry manufactured food from the
leaves, the pith or dead center of the wood? In fact one can count the
age of the tree when it died by counting the annular rings. And how long
had the tree died. The circumstances of its death, and the events like
drought, flood, fire that it had undergone.
Next
time you visit a quarry, or landscape supplier, or simply walking along
a river bed, or rocky cliff, be keen at the possible presence of
petrified wood. If there are more clues to the fossil you can even tell
what tree it was. Is it already extinct? Is it the ancestor of modern
species? What if the tree has not changed, evidenced by its similarity
with its living progeny?
Indeed
fossils are nature's geologic timepieces; they take us thousands, if
not millions of years back. Didn't Charles Darwin gauge the stages of
evolution of plants and animals through paleontology - the science of
the study of fossils?
Fossil of Giant Staghorn Coral
At
first I didn't see it, until the tides left it in shallow water. It is a
fossil of a very big staghorn coral, its base cut like the anther of a
deer after the mating season. So clean did it appear I can count the
number of years the coral lived. But that is deceiving because corals
grow very slow. It takes fifty long years to grow to the size of a man's
head. Each ring therefore, is compounded with other rings, making it
difficult to tell the exact age of the fossil. A clear break may be an
indication of an extreme condition of the environment that left such
mark.
How
do fossils retain their form and structure even to the detail? Well,
calcium carbonate seeps into the cells, and tissues, and in this
particular case, into the fine structures like pores of the coral
skeleton where the compound solidifies hard - harder than the mold
itself. It's a skeleton in a skeleton, so to speak. Through hundreds or
thousand of years the mold disintegrates leaving behind the hardened
calcium compound. The process is also the same in wood turning into rock
- petrified rock.
Here is a fossil of a bivalve - a big Tridachna,
as large as the shell of its progeny shown in the lower photo. This
shell is a receptacle of holy water at the entrance of Mt. Carmel
Church QC. Shells survive adverse conditions of the environment, and as
such also retain their original shape and form. Sand and silt become
sedimentary rock entombing the shell until it is discovered through
erosion and other means.
Fossil specimens at the former SPUQC MuseumEveryday we encounter fossils and pseudo fossils we simply call skeletons, or artifacts if they did not directly come from living things. Fossils are always in the making. There is no ceasing since the appearance of life on earth, and ever expanding with increasing biodiversity of the living world.
They are the remains of living things that survive time and circumstances, and of luck or fate as people put it. The older and better preserved fossils are, the more significant is the discovery - and the more we realize the secrets they reveal. Scientists reconstruct fossils close to their original form and virtual reality, complete with the organism's movements, sounds, habitat, special effects included. Thanks to advanced technology and fine arts.
Toys are then patterned after these reconstructed fossils. I know of children who grew up with collections of dinosaurs, birds, mammals, fish- all reconstructions from fossils. Many of these children grew into scientists and naturalists. I know of other children who were more interested with toy cartoon characters. They took a different career path, less meaningful and fulfilling than that of the latter children.
Geologic time is not constant though it may be contiguum. There are intervening factors we may not and never know. And if this were the case, we say, we have yet to discover the "missing link." Such was the predicament of Darwin in his theory of evolution, the bewilderment of Wallace before him, and the deceiving simplicity of Lamarck theory to decipher correctly the path of evolution. Fossils reveal the web of life as a labyrinth. We can only appreciate the early works of other paleontologists that Cuvier and Huxley who could only make inferences about life in the past and the present. In spite of all these, the world looks at all these men as pioneers and greatest fossil hunters.
Do you like to be a fossil hunter, too? ~
Fossils and artifacts at the UST Museum of Natural History
Fossils at UPLB Museum of Natural History
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