Click on the pictures to see very enlarged image. It’s quite heavy for its size and is very sparkly in the sun. Something seems to be starting to bulge out the underside of it.
I believe those are minerals veins, probably of silica. They are more resistant than rest of the rock together, so you get less weathering.
I do not think that is a fossil, but it is still cool.
Not a fossil.
Looks like some kind of igneous/metamorphic rock with quartz veining. Really hard to tell what it is when only seeing the weathered surface.
If its sedimentary, its not impossible to have fossils in it…But its not the prime sort of sedimentary rock for fossils. You want shale, mudstone and that sort of thing… that would still be soft and crumbly…
An igneus or metamorphic wouldn’t have fossils.
The lines are not due to fossil inclusions, its due to altered mineralisation of the rock itself… the deposits crack it and glue it back together too. I think its rock due to being sedimentary, it was first layed down as a bunch of sediments (sand, dust,silt, and pebbles ?) and its since concreted… just turned solid due to mineral migration processes.
The smoother dark side is black due to minerals too, its not due to a giant leaf or layer of moss or anything biological being fossilised. The minerals in the dark outside layer may be due to very much more recent activity, eg while this stone is lying on the surface level, rather than the slower older mineralisation of the cracks which occurred when it was still underground.
Where did you find the rock?
As noted, the veins appear to be harder rock that resists weathering more, so they stand out and resemble something organic.
Such deceptive rock formations are so common and so frequently mistaken for fossils that they have a name – pseudofossils Some are extremely convincing. I certainly found more than my share as a kid when I went out prospecting for fossils, and was then extremely disheartened when I realized the truth. When I finally did find fossils, they were unmistakable, and not at all what I had suspected. They were bryozoans, a class of fossil and organism I had never before heard of.
That’s not exactly true, they’re rare, and highly dependent on the degree of metamorphism but e.g slates can host fossils, I’ve pulled trilobites and brachiopods out of slate beds myself, and more than one Lagerstätten is slate-hosted, like the Hunsrück Slate - Wikipedia. Then, there’s volcanic ash beds, those also can host fossils and are somewhere between igneous and sedimentary.
Thank you for the feedback. I guess it’s probably just veining wearing away at a different rate than the rest of it. I am tempted to crack it open though.
Here is a fossil I found last year - Inoceramus vancouverensis. Almost all of my finds are from Englishman River on Vancouver Island.
This is a plummet I found in the river:
Not seeing the Inoceramus in that, tbh, but I’ll take your word for it. Also, you have it mislabeled as an ammonite in the gallery.
I took it to these guys who identified it for me. Thank you, I forgot that I originally thought it was an ammonite so I’ve changed it on flickr.
Yeah, I didn’t mean I doubted the ID, just that I’m not seeing the bivalve there. It’s definitely something.