Mechetlino Geological Section

What does it feel like to stand with your feet on the bottom of the Ural Ocean? To see creatures that already seem fantastic today? One glance at the history is not enough! "hundreds of millions of years?" In Russia, this is possible only in one place. This is possible in the Yangan-Tau Geopark, where time is compressed into a 30-meter reservoir — the Mechetlino geological section. Each layer of it is a bygone era that lasted for tens of thousands of years.

Today, there is still a lot of life around the Mechetlino section, but it is already settled, terrestrial, inhabited by intelligent people with the same rich cultural and historical past.

The geological section consists of rocks — sand, siltstone, mudstone, limestone, which accumulated at the end of the Arta and early Kungur centuries about 283 million years ago in a warm sea, first at depth, then in shallow water and near the shore. These rocks formed long before the age of dinosaurs, which came almost 80 million years later.

In the geological rocks that make up the mountain, you can find the remains of vertebrates (conodonts, fish) and invertebrates (foraminifera, trilobites, ammonoids, brachiopods) of animals, as well as ancient horsetails (kalamites).

Fossils of life from past millennia

Fossils of the former inhabitants of this land around the world are considered landmarks for determining the age of the strata. Who lived here when there was an ocean in this area? What fossils can you touch with your hands today?

Foraminifera are the simplest organisms represented by a single cell, they can be very small and relatively large. For example, fusulinids are the "giants" among them, they can be seen with the naked eye.
Ammonoids are extinct cephalopods that created beautiful spiral shells around their bodies, like those of modern argonauts and nautilus.
Brachiopods are animals whose body is placed in a bivalve shell, similar to mollusks.
Trilobites– crustacean animals, crawled along the bottom and, like vacuum cleaners, collected organic sludge, from which they extracted nutritional residues.
Conodonts are a worm—like animal with teeth. The dental apparatus is presented in the form of a small saw, which is preserved in a fossil state).
Fish are not common, but there are rare finds of skeletal parts.

Geolocation

Address:
Republic of Bashkortostan, Salavatsky district, village of Mechetlino