Reporter Pu Yanqi reported
On the afternoon of June 19, Mr. Li, a citizen, called the newspaper's 3585000 news hotline to say that he found many suspected fossil stones on the mountain on the north side of Dongzhuang Village in Xihe Town, Zichuan District, and could clearly see the shapes of animals and plants on the stones.
The reporter came to Dongzhuang Village, Xihe Town, Zichuan District, and learned that Li Ning, a villager who found fossils, had a hobby of collecting strange stones and root carvings.
In Li Ning's home, there are many stones he collected, and the patterns on them are some like plant branches and leaves, some look like conchs, and some of the insects on the stones are oval in shape, with clear contours and visible textures.
"In 2017, I was looking for stones in the mountains north of the village and accidentally lost my mobile phone." Li Ning told reporters that in the process of finding the mobile phone, he accidentally found several stones with strange patterns, and the whole pattern seemed to be embedded in the inside of the stone, blending with the stone. From that time on, he searched for the stone in the mountains surrounding the village. Seventy or eighty stones have been collected in recent years, and although the economic value is not known, he believes that the study of the surrounding geological changes should be helpful.
Li Ning led the reporter to the bottom of the mountain where the fossils were found, and stones with animal and plant motifs would also be found in the stone cliffs of the terraced fields piled up on the roadside.
Mr. Zhao, a villager, said that when he was a child, the old man in the village told such a legend: "A long time ago, the mountain was surrounded by a sea, and there were two mountains across the water, which looked like the nose of a sheep from a distance, and now these two mountains still have the name of 'sheep's nose'." In the deep ditch between the two mountains, there is a hook used to tie the boat for passing ships to dock temporarily. "Although these legends cannot be verified, they may be related to the appearance of fossils on the mountain." Li Ning thinks.
In this regard, the staff of the Mineral Resources Protection and Supervision Section of the Zibo Municipal Bureau of Natural Resources told reporters that these fossils may be Amenjiao stone and sea lily fossils. It is inferred that most of these fossils belong to the Cambrian and Ordovician, dating back about 540-440 million years, and it is necessary to identify in detail which stratigraphic level it belongs to. The staff member said that from a biostratigraphic point of view, fossils can be used to determine the geological age of rocks, and different geological periods have different representative fossils. Due to the good exposure of Ordovician strata in Zichuan, Boshan and Yiyuan mountains, such fossils can often be seen.