The Mystery of Life by Jan Paul Schutten

Author:Jan Paul Schutten
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aladdin

What Do You Need if You Want to Find Fossils?

Shubin knew that three ingredients were necessary to find a particular sort of fossil. You can use the same ingredients yourself if you ever go hunting for fossils. First, you have to look inside rocks of the right age. Second, you need the sort of rocks that can contain fossils. And third, you have to be very—no, make that very, very—lucky!

The first ingredient was easy to work out, for Shubin. The fossils of the fishlike amphibians and the amphibian-like fish were around 375 and 380 million years old. For his fossil, Shubin had to go looking for rock that was somewhere around these ages. You can look on the internet nowadays to find out where this kind of stone occurs. That’s what Shubin does too.

The second ingredient wasn’t too tricky to arrange either. There’s no point investigating rocks that were once molten lava, for instance. No fossil can survive at the temperature of liquid stone. But other layers of rock, such as limestone or sandstone, are suitable. Again, you can look on the internet to see where exactly you can find these kinds of rocks. Shubin discovered three large areas with exactly the right kind of stone. The first was in a spot with lots of buildings. It’s difficult to dig beneath a parking garage, so that was out. The second was in a region that had been thoroughly studied by paleontologists. The chance of Shubin finding something there that everyone else had overlooked was slim. So he knew not to start searching there either. But the third region was a vast plain near the North Pole, where no one ever went. Shubin knew that was the place to go!

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