Out walking on a sunny fall day and I found a fossil! I think it’s a leaf. I don’t know anything about fossils really but I imagine the blue colour has to do with oxidation or something?
I also saw lots of bear poo and a pile of cougar poo :eek: but I didn’t take pictures of those.
Ta-da!:
If you click on the picture, it enlarges quite a bit so you can see the detail.
I hate to break it to you, but that looks just as likely to be manganese mineralization as a leaf fossil. The interesting bit (bottom half of the right half) is way out of focus, so it’s hard to tell…
Well that’s disappointing! Here’s a better picture:
I think you’re right. Pseudo fossils similar to the photo below (not mine) can be found in the Mojave Desert, causing much excitement (until as in my own case, a geologist friend gently deflated my balloon).
If you’re interested in finding fossils, this may be useful based on the location in your profile.
You could seek out an expert opinion, but that does not look like a fossil to me. Sorry, finding a fossil is really exciting.
Bear in mind that not actually being a fossil doesn’t make the specimen any less pleasant to look at.
By “fossil” one might mean various things (although I suppose real fossil scientists might be very particular about the terminology). It could be a mineralized (petrified) or otherwise preserved specimen of an actual ancient living entity; or it might be some preserved secondary evidence like an impression of a shell in a rock. (Is the latter properly called a “fossil”?)
Hiking in low-lying coastal hills, one can easily find lots of rocks with shell impressions in them – if you don’t see any immediately, try picking up smallish rocks and breaking them open. When I used to hike in the coastal hills in San Luis Obispo County area (central California coast area), I found those all the time.
Sometimes one encounters an entire boulder in a hillside full of shell impressions.
A fossil can be anything from the past, whether an actual artifact or just an impression. The famous Laetoli Footprints are certainly considered fossils and they are “just”, well, footprints.
Thank you - that’s a great link!
Very true!
Yeah, I’m not seeing any clear evidence it’s a fossil, not a mineral stain. Sorry again.
Yes, but what you’re describing isn’t (usually) *just *the *impression *of a shell, like the shell was pressed down and then moved away - often there *was *a shell, but it’s been replaced by other minerals - this is called a cast.
But yes, even resting impressions, feeding traces and burrows can fossilize - these are known as trace fossils.