.WOSU investigated why some people were finding perfectly sphere-shaped rocks in their backyards. It turns out they're concretions, and they provide a view into Ohio's prehistoric past.
"We found this thing, which I immediately thought was a cannon ball," Heiser said,"I spent a lot of time trying to find out if there were stone cannonballs to find out that there were not. And then I wondered, what is it?"project about her mysterious rock.. They're millions of years old, and they're everywhere in Ohio.
This all happened back in the Devonian age, about 360 million years ago. It was a time before dinosaurs known as the “age of fish.” The sea that covered Ohio was swarming with life, and the fossil record indicates that a species of enormous armored fish called Dunkleosteus hunted for prey in the waters near the surface.Credit Ricky Romero / flickr, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
"Bacteria and microorganisms will start breaking down organic matter around that jaw bone and that will change the chemistry in the mud and water around that jaw bone," Danielsen explained."The change in chemistry allows for the carbonate minerals to start precipitating in that zone." Geologist Erika Danielsen and WOSU listener Elizabeth Heiser stand by three large concretions in the Shale Hollow Park ravine.When Heiser learned that paleontologists sometimes find fossils inside concretions, she was curious about the chances her own might contain one. Danielsen said the probability is pretty low.
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