Barb-Harmony Art Mom (of Outdoor Hour fame) suggested in the comments that a rock that we thought was just a pretty painted rock, might be a rock with shell fossils embedded in it.
And she was right!
I finally got around to having a closer look at the rock, and you can clearly see that those white circles are little shells - like pipi or cockle shells.
I found a good New Zealand shellfish identification guide, here. It's hard to tell what sort of shellfish these are, since the outer surface isn't really visible - the ones which would have been on the outside have broken, leaving only the outline shape of the shell. We are not going to break it open to see more!
So that's pretty cool. We now officially have fossils in our rock collection!
The only downside is that we found this rock in our garden, quite clearly placed there by the previous owners of the house (now both deceased), so we have absolutely no idea where it was collected from. It would have been nice to be able to 'complete the paperwork' for this specimen, but we're pretty happy just to have seen it and to know that it is possible to find them ourselves.
2 comments:
I have seen stones like that vaguely around Oamaru. What's more, I remember my grandfather (who was brought up inland from Duntroon) telling me that when he was a child he was very intrigued by often finding stones away up in the North Otago hills (ie a very long way from the sea) with fossilised shells embedded in the stones like this.
Cool, thanks for that. It's good to have a vague idea of where it *might* have come from :)
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