Ancient Egg Cluster Preserved in Glass

The first million-year-old fossils of half-thousand clusters of soft-shelled eggs have been preserved of a new strange way in China of the south; some of eggs were even taken in the act to divide itself. The three-dimensional clusters of eggs terrified of the invertebrate animals that lived in a sea make 501 million a 510 million years preserve in silicone crystal essentially. Jih-Pai Lin, paleontology of the university of state of Ohio, explained this is a totally unexpected way so that the smooth eggs fossilize and survive for eons.


Lin is the author of the lead of a report on the clusters of the egg published in the application of December the Geology of the newspaper. The means of the discovery are probably still more fossilized early old rock eggs and embryos there. The fossil hunters as soon as the diverse ways need to have present that can be that they are preserved, and therefore the diverse types of rocks on which can be that they are found. "This one is the intact cluster known to a great extent older of the disclosed egg," the news this Lin of the discovery.
Other eggs have found of age similar, but they are dispersed, that is except distant revealing on the animal that put eggs, he explained. Egg cluster to be probably to preserve in same point he to be to put in sea floor, that to say something on unknown strategy early animal to use to reproduce, Lin said. He could also make reference to how much energy had the animal that stops to make eggs, and therefore how much food was available in the floor of old sea in that time far distant, he said. "The clusters to provide a little more detail in the picture of the Cambrian ecology," said Lin, referring to the geologic era in which exploded life first, beginning some makes 543 million years. That happiness, other paleontlogist is impressed more by the fact that the eggs, and possibly equal embryos, of old organisms can now be looked for on silicone-based rocks.


"The fresh thing on this is the preservation," said to paleontologist Whitey Hagadorn of the university of Amherst, referring to the silicone that replaced the smooth pieces of eggs. The previous eggs and embryos of the Cambrian and have been previous on carbonate-rich and phosphate-rich rocks of the calcium, that of many ways was probably resembled the original chemistry of the sediments in which the eggs were put.


The fossil eggs of the silicone that Lin and its colleagues are studying, on the other hand, required a entirely diverse process of fossilization that is rather the one of the terrified wood more of high quality. The details of the individual cells of the interior of the structures even can be considered sometimes. The source of silicone for fossilization probably came from spicules of crystal of sponges found on same rocks, Lin conjectured.

"That is something we had not known before" said Hagadorn of the preservation of silicone. Lin explained the discovery of this method to preserve the eggs that the means are a whole rock class there as of the Cambrian era in the several parts of the world that can be explored for eggs and older embryos.