Tag Archives: pseudofossil

Wooster’s Pseudofossils of the Week: Artifacts in thin-sections of Ordovician limestones from southeastern Minnesota

Mark Wilson October 21, 2016 12:01 am

It is always exciting to a geologist when thin-sections of curious rocks are completed and ready for view. A thin-section is a wafer of rock (30 microns thick) glues to a glass slide and examined by transmitted light through a … Continue reading →

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Wooster’s Pseudofossil of the Week: It’s not what it looks like

Mark Wilson September 30, 2016 12:01 am

Impressive, isn’t it? You can practically smell it steaming on your screen. Hard to believe this object is Miocene in age, about 6 million years old. Here’s another similar specimen in a top view, if we can say that. And … Continue reading →

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Wooster’s Pseudofossils of the Week: Shatter cones from southern Ohio

Mark Wilson March 4, 2016 12:01 am

This brief post is a correction of a previous entry. Last year I showed what I thought were shatter cones collected many years ago in Adams County, Ohio, by the late Professor Frank L. Koucky of The College of Wooster. … Continue reading →

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Wooster’s Pseudofossils of the Week: Cone-in-cone structures from southern Ohio

Mark Wilson October 30, 2015 12:04 am

Author’s note: James Chesire convinced me through the comments and later correspondence that what we actually have here are cone-in-cone structures, not shatter cones. I’ve thus changed the title but have left the post below in its original form. They … Continue reading →

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Wooster’s Fossil (Maybe) of the Week: Kinneyia ripples

Mark Wilson October 23, 2015 12:01 am

While hiking through the Niagara Gorge on a field trip in August, my friend Andrej Ernst of the University of Kiel found the above block of siltstone from the Grimsby Formation (Silurian) with unusual small-scale ripples in a patch. Carl … Continue reading →

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Wooster’s Pseudofossil of the Week: Manganese dendrites from Germany

Mark Wilson January 20, 2013 1:33 am

We haven’t had a pseudofossil in this space for awhile. A pseudofossil is an object that is often mistaken for a fossil but is actually inorganic. The above may look like  fossil fern, but it is instead a set of … Continue reading →

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Wooster’s “Fossil” of the Week: The most famous pseudofossil ever (Proterozoic of Canada)

Mark Wilson May 8, 2011 1:51 am

This week’s specimen is a piece of obscure paleontological history, although it represents a “fossil” that was for a short time one of the most prominent in the world. In 1864, the uber-geologist Charles Lyell claimed it was “one of … Continue reading →

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