Happy Thought for 26 July 2024

Have a Happy Thought: 

 

Many of us (I’m assuming – I definitely did) wanted to be a fossil-hunter (or maybe just fossil-finder) at some point in our lives. Why are fossils important? Well, other than being really cool to find, and other than the fact that they stick to your tongue when you lick them… they give us a sense of history, a way to understand how the current plants and animals we share the earth with came to be. In other words, fossils are “the whakapapa of our celebrated flora and fauna.”1

 

If you live in the US, you can get these amazing books “Roadside Geology of…” that help you “interpret the rocks and landscapes visible outside your car window… [and will] guide you to outcrops and roadcuts where you can stretch your legs and expand your minds.”

 

Some of this geology information is very useful to fossil-hunters, who want to know where to look for rock layers of a certain age.

https://mountain-press.com/collections/roadside-geology/products/roadside-geology-of-idaho from Mountain Press Publishing Company.

 

New Zealand has a similar resource, The Field Guide to New Zealand Geology from Penguin Books. (Note to self: buy this book). (Wait no, note to husband: buy this book for me, please!)

(Ooh! There’s also a free online resource that looks amazing - https://www.geotrips.org.nz/downloads/Ballance_NZ_Geology-V2.pdf)

 

But… none of these tell you exactly where to find fossils.

 

May I introduce you to… Fred.

Fred, the Fossil Record Electronic Database (fred.org.nz) is an online database, free to use and access, that will help you find fossils… at least in New Zealand. This database, online and available to the public since 2003, publishes the long Fossil File Record that has been gathering data since the 1940s, and incorporates data gathered even before that. Apparently New Zealand is one of the only places in the world that has been gathering this sort of data in one central place, let alone making it so freely available to the public (and it’s not just me that’s excited about this).

Image: screencapture of the FRED interactive map showing fossil-related sites in the Taranaki region.

 

So on your next road trip, or maybe just your next afternoon outing, get out and explore the many and wonderful fossilised plants and animals of all shapes and sizes, and in doing so get out and interact with all of the living plants and animals. Maybe get involved in saving some of them – your mind and your planet will thank you for it later!

Image: a selection of type fossils from the National Paleontological Collection Database https://data.gns.cri.nz/npc/catalogue/index.jsp

 

 

 1 Clowes, C. D., Crampton, J. S., Bland, K. J., Collins, K. S., Prebble, J. G., Raine, J. I., … Womack, T. (2020). The New Zealand Fossil Record File: a unique database of biological history. New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics, 64(1), 62–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/00288306.2020.1799827

 

Thanks to https://techhub.social/@GregCocks/112797558237585695 on mastodon for bringing this to us all.

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