On April 26, when Chen Shangbin, director of the Department of Geology of China University of Mining and Technology, was on a business trip, he found fossil debris on the toilet of Guiyang Airport and photographed it in the circle of friends. Dr. Maiping Qian, a stratigraphic paleontologist, identified as a fossil of an owl shell nearly 400 million years ago.
Stringocephalus owl head shell
01 Description: Large shell, nearly rounded, biconvex, slightly higher convexity of the ventral flap. The hinge contains short curves, has triangular double plates, and the oval fleshy stem hole is located in the upper part of the triangular plate. The shell surface is smooth. The ventral flap has a tall mid-plate. The back center plate is short. The wristband is wide and long.
02 Location of origin: Wuxuan to Xiangzhou, Guangxi, China, Donggangling Formation of the Middle Clay Basin. Age: About 390 million years.
03 Age: About 390 million years
To tell you the truth, seeing this matter, scientific, rational, cautious as I am... It is unbelief. In a survey of nearly 60,000 people, more than half of the netizens sided with xiaobian:
However, two days later, on April 28, the staff of Guiyang Airport responded that Professor Chen had indeed released fossil remains and had been procured. In the process of interviewing the media, Zhan Gengshen, secretary general of the Geological Society of Jiangsu Province, also said: The age of fossil formation is very far away from us, but in real life, it is actually very close to us. The fossil slabs in the toilets of Guiyang Airport are produced in the Yunnan-Guichuan area, and many in the building materials industry use them as decorative motherboards.
Zhan Gengshen updated Weibo that this fossil is not 390 million years ago, but 440 million years ago, the five-room shellfish, which is also a more common brachiopod shell.
△ Zhan Gengshen Weibo on April 27
△ Stone shell shell
Don't say you don't know, say it and be shocked. After all, it is to blame our shallow knowledge, there are eyes that do not recognize fossils, we ordinary people go to the toilet is to go to the toilet, who cares about what fossils, in our opinion are all stones, archaeologists are not the same, the last toilet have found fossils ...
Surely, after all, people go out with a small hammer!
It is understood that teacher Chen Shangbin pushed the handwashing station of Guiyang Airport on the hot search, or from the new issue of the "Open Talk" program, teacher Chen who was at Guiyang Airport at the time, saw Professor Shen in the program mentioned the fossil of the airport, and went to verify... Sure enough, the two industry insiders reached a consensus. Professor Shen, on the other hand, is a paleontologist with a small hammer.
Shen Shuzhong, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a stratigraphic paleontologist, said in the program that he wanted to study the stones when he saw them, and found that the marbles of many hotels and airports often contained a variety of fossils, and the marble in the toilets of Guiyang Airport also deeply attracted him.
So the question is, will the men's toilet at Guiyang Airport become a place for Internet celebrities to punch cards during may day? After all, the earth has changed and the sea has changed, and it is really a magical experience to touch things hundreds of millions of years ago!
But don't worry, this experience may be found in many places.
Certified as a paleontology science writer @ Jiang's little robber dragon said that fossils are actually not far away from us, and you may rub shoulders with fossils when you go out on a trip! The picture below is the washstand of the hotel where he went to Yunnan in the summer of 2020, on which he can see fossils, which have been confirmed to be ordovician coral fossils, 450 million years ago.
It seems that there is a real good chance that we will often rub shoulders with ancient creatures from hundreds of millions of years ago! When you get off work, Xiaobian will go home and study the floor, wash stand or something... Fossils of this kind of thing, and cultural relics, the research value is very high, it seems that the ornamental value is also very good, but for today's hot search, perhaps as a self-proclaimed student of China University of Mining and Technology netizen @ please call me Huang - Half Immortal Said: I hope that everyone can take this to understand paleontology, understand geology, and open the heavenly eye to observe the earth!
Many netizens have already gone to Guiyang Airport to punch in!
If you go to Guiyang, will you go to the toilet to punch in and send a circle of friends "400 million years ago"?
Some of the material in this article is synthesized from Sina Weibo
Editor-in-Charge: Min Chen