Jimu news reporter Chen Jun
Correspondent Li Can
Over the mountains, the sea of clouds is ethereal, not only can you enjoy the beautiful landscape, but also the geological wonders to discover.
Xuan'en two strange stone lovers Tang Ping and You Feng, came to Shahexi Village in Shadaogou Town a few days ago and accidentally found a lot of trilobite fossils on the bare mountain body on the side of the winding mountain road. After identification by geological experts, it was confirmed that this was a Cambrian trilobite fossil dating back 560 million years.
Tang Level is a well-known local qishi player in Xuan'en, who has traveled all over the Enshi Mountains for more than 30 years and has studied Qingjiang stone and Aurora horn stone very much. In November last year, Tang horizontally mined and polished a 3-meter-high, 5.06-meter-wide and 11-ton "Aurora Horn Stone", a paleontological fossil with more than 800 fossils formed by more than 400 million molluscs more than 400 million years ago, which was carefully carved and collectively presented on a 15-meter-wide rectangular boulder, which caused a sensation in the local area.
On the 17th, he took the reporter to the mountain where the fossils were found. From the town of Shadaogou along the steep winding path all the way, after the rain, the clouds between the mountains are like a fairyland, and to the top of the mountain at an altitude of nearly 1,000 meters, a large number of fossils appear on the mountain rocks on the roadside. "I usually like to look around for strange stones and fossils, and I came here a few days ago to have this idea, but I didn't expect to harvest so much." Tang said that at that time, he found that there were many trilobite fossils on a mountain, the volume of the mountain was about 500 cubic meters, the profile of the fossil found was about 50 square meters, and the profile of the fossil found in the other two mountains was about 120 square meters.
The reporter saw that the surface of the mountain rock can clearly see dark fossils, some on the surface of the rock, some in the stone crevices, and the pattern of insects on it is still obvious.
Chen Si, deputy director of the third institute of the Chongqing Institute of Geology and Mineral Resources, looked at it and identified that the geological age of the trilobite fossils on them was the Cambrian period about 560 million years ago. Trilobite fossils, also known as bat stones. Trilobites, a paleopod of the family Trilobites, were born on the seafloor, with a wide variety of species and sizes ranging from one centimeter to one meter, born in the Cambrian Period (570 million years), peaked in the Ordovician (450 million years), and died out during the Permian mass extinction event at the end of the Permian.
Chen Xiaolong, an expert at the Hubei Academy of Geological Sciences, said after watching the video that seeing so many trilobites fossils in rock formations, he couldn't help but think of trilobites, arthropods swimming freely in the Cambrian ocean 500 million years ago. Because of its "many brothers" (a large number of genera), it occupies different ecological spaces in the ocean, and its ability to survive and adapt to the environment is extremely strong, and it is the uncompromising overlord of the ocean during the Cambrian period. 250 million years ago, at the turn of the Permian and Triassic, the most serious mass extinction event in the history of earth's organisms occurred, about 75% of terrestrial organisms and 95% of marine life species went extinct, and the strong trilobites also completely disappeared in this extinction, which cannot help but be lamented.
The tectonic movement of the earth over hundreds of millions of years, the uplift of the earth's crust, so that the ancient creatures that originally lived in the ocean appeared on the top of the mountain in the form of fossils, witnessing the geological history of the local vicissitudes of Enshi, which is really rare. It is an excellent place to study the cambrian biological explosion and the history of earth science, and if conditions permit, it can also be a good place for study trips and geoscience knowledge popularization.
For more exciting information, please download the "Jimu News" client in the app market, welcome to provide news leads, and pay as soon as you adopt them. 24-hour reporting hotline 027-86777777.