How does it feel to stand with your feet on the bottom of the Ural Ocean? See creatures that already seem fantastic today? One glance at the history is not enough! "hundreds of millions of years?" In Russia, this is only possible 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 of its layers is a bygone era that lasted for tens of thousands of years.
What will you see in Mechetlino?The geological section consists of rocks – sand, siltstone, mudstone, limestone-that accumulated in the late Arta and early Kungur ages about 283 million years ago in the warm sea, first at depth, then in shallow water and near the shore. These rocks were 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), as well as ancient horsetails (calamites).
Today, there is still a lot of life around the Mechetlino section, but it is already settled, land-based, populated by intelligent people with the same rich cultural and historical past.
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 are very small and relatively large. For example, fusulinids are "giants" among them, they can be seen with the naked eye.
- Ammonoids are extinct cephalopods that created beautiful spiral shells around their bodies, like modern Argonauts and nautilus.
- Brachiopods — animals whose body is placed in a bivalve shell, similar to mollusks.
- Trilobites are crustacean animals that crawled along the bottom and, like vacuum cleaners, collected organic silt, from which they extracted nutrient 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 - not common, but there are rare finds of skeletal parts.
The remains of many fossils are visible to the eye and palpable, others need to look closely to see.
More complete information about the Mechetlino section can be found on the website of the Geological Bulletin of the IG UFIC RAS.