Fossils and Modern Humans

[Ninurta]

I recall when I was a kid finding a fossil in northeast Ohio that had a metal machine screw embedded in the rock, about a #8 machine screw. It was about an inch or so of the shank broken off below the head of the screw. Never did figure out how it go into the rock, but it was there when I split the rock open, and there wasn't any bore-hole leading in to it.

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I too have found some strange things but nothing like what you found. I remembered reading about things like this and found one of the texts, I dont agree with it a 100% but its always good to look at all sides . Do you still have them ?

Sadly, I don't still have it. I was a kid at the time, and like so many things kids collect, it got tossed in a box and the box itself disappeared over the years. Along with it went a variety of other fossils I had collected from various locations, mainly "slate dumps", which around here are what we call the artificial mountains made out of the parts of the Earth that come out of coal mines that can't be used as coal. Some places they are called "spoils dumps", other places call them "tailings". I had the usual collection of fern fosils from the coal mines, and a few other oddities like a lizard of some sort that was around 6 or 7 inches long, and what I thought was a fossilized section of a snake, which I found out in later years was probably part of a branch of a "scale tree", or Lepidodendron, and not a snake or anything like a snake at all.

In the Cambrian era limestone deposits I grew up in, I've found all sorts of sea life from "stromatilites" which are layered colonies of bacteria that gave Earth her oxygen long, long ago, to shells and worm trails in what was, back then, the mud of a sea floor - but is now about 2400 feet above sea level. One thing I found there was never identified. It was a donut-shaped ring about 2 1/2 inches around at the outside, the surface of which was serrated with little diamond-shaped bumps. I took it to biologists and geologists at the University of North Carolina when I live there hoping to get it identified, but never found out what it was. One biologist said he thought it might be a "lamprey mouth".

All of my fossils, including the "machine screw" or whatever it was, are gone now. Even the slate dumps where many of them came from (not the "machine screw", however - I found it in Ohio), are disappearing. There used to be hundreds of them here where I live now, and not even a trace of a single one is left. They were hauled away in dump-truck loads in the interest of "ecology", with nary a thought about the paleontological remains they contained.