I've found some cool fern and animal fossils embedded in solid rock here too MJM. Most were found laying on top of the ground. Never dug for them.

That does not look like coal those track are in. What kind of rock was that those tracks got placed in? Limestone? It looks harder than that though Certainly not granite?

We were in a 40” coal seam. The roof was shale rock. Made up of many layers.

Imagine you were walking in the mud. You’ll leave depressed tracks in the self ground. Those depressions you left get filled with more silt. And more silt overlays everything. The silt eventually turns to rock after being compressed for millions of years. When we mined the coal underneath the shale containing the tracks, the prints you see appear to be raised. But actually what you’re seeing is the depressed tracks, that filled with silt, with the layer beneath removed.

Here was a different kind of track. These weren’t as common.



And another critter

Those pictures are three hundred feet underground, let that sink in for a while.

How did three hundred feet of material deposited in layers, end up on top of what used to be the surface?

That would be from plate tectonics.

Wow! That looks like some kind of mammal track/ungulate track with the dewclaws. That would put the timing off considerably if that shale seam is indeed 300+ million years old.
I've worked around coal mines a long time, but all strip mines here. We never get to see that cool stuff, the dragline buries it all.

I suspect a cataclysmic global flood.

Perhaps the Appalachians were not built by plate tectonics, but rather they are a giant deposit from two great water bodies fighting against one another....The drainage way of the Mississippi and the where ever the Atlantic was then.

If there is shale on top of it, then I think it was from a giant deposit from an outside force; not that it rose from the bottoms of the depths of the ocean.

The amphibian tracks clearly did not come from the bottom of the ocean.

Here in Pa, we have a lot of coal seams….the Pittsburgh, Upper, Middle, and Lower Kittanning, Upper and Lower Freeport, and the Clarion ( or Brookville ) seams. I worked in all of them at one time or another. Anywhere from 100 feet of cover down to 800 feet below the surface. I’ve been in mines in Colorado that were 1600 feet deep. One thing every coal seam has in common….at one time, they were a swampy bog of decaying vegetation, on the surface of the earth. It’s hard to understand how something buried 1600 feet underground in the Rocky Mountains was ever a swamp, but it was. The coal seam height would be dependent on how long the swamp existed with decaying vegetation before it was covered up with sand or silt.

^exactly, this is million’s of years of deposits piled up over one another. Go find any old abandoned farmstead and see what has been covered over with dirt and grass. Oftentimes in fifty years of neglect an old sidewalk will have 6+ inches of dirt covering it. For anyone that enjoys fossil hunting, the Badlands is simply amazing. Also a great visual representation of periods of time locked in layers that are easy to see. Amazing finds and pictures Bigbrownie!!

Anyone have any ideas on this?

I find it hilarious how so called scientists pull numbers out of their hat and hardly anyone questions them.

Chancey, when I seen the title, I thought I better open it, as I’m a fossil! Starting to get a bit hard around the edges! LOL

No idea if it’s a tooth, but my guess is no, just a rock shaped like a tooth!

Yes Bernie, me too! This has been going on for so long now, everyone doesn’t dispute it anymore!

And more proof that Weather has been changing all of those years!!!

That's the same reason I opened it too )))

I don't think it's a tooth either.I think the large end was stuck in the mud while the pointy end was sticking up into moving water.. Also agree with Tatiana the black bands are more erosion resistant material.


These days the dating of rocks is pretty darned accurate. We know the half-life of most common molecules, But in stuff this old it is common to measure the amount of U-238 relative to it's daughter isotope (lead) PB 206. The half life of U 238 is about 160,000 years so by measuring the two we can figure out the age to within about 1 % accuracy.

For younger stuff or in archeological digs ( bones) carbon 14 dating is used because the stuff isn't nearly as old as rocks,

Those are tracks not rocks. So you actually believe that the mud where those tracks were made instantly turned into rock after the animal walked across them? Like before the next rain they went from mud to rock? 330 million years ago. Not 230 million years ago, not 350 million years ago, 330 million years ago.

Dude there is no way I will I will ever abandon my intellect to the point where I believe any person could know that. Never.

Better work on your reading comprehension. I never mentioned any tracks. Maybe you are trying to respond to someone who said something else because you sure are not making any sense in response to my post.

Last summer at one of my northern Canada fly in locations the water was lower than ever. Near a rocky rapids flowing from one lake down into another, we portaged each day and on that low side there were big exposed mud/clay flats where previously we motored over those to sand shores.
The line of sand beach I was used to there was hi and dry, maybe 20 yards of those mud flats to water edge. Terrible muck to get to the boats. There were bear and moose tracks in that muck as well.

One night we had a pretty good rain and I walked over the portage to that mud flat area I saw the rain had washed some areas of that high sand line down over the exposed mud flats and in some spots enough sand to fill a few moose and bear tracks. I stood there and wondered if those sand filled prints would fossilize like that and be around in x million years.

I’m booked back in that location in May and I look forward to seeing that spot and if the sand stayed in those prints, got washed out, lake came back up and covered it all….

Osky

Yes !!!

That is absolutely, positively a fossilized gobbler turkey turd !!!

w