And you thought Ninja Turtles were old school!!!

Let's be honest with each other, my enthusiasm for geology is waning... I would like to say that I am trying hard to recover it, but that would not be the truth. I am going to fake it until I make it. I am going to continue to study and write these blogs merely because my grade depends on it and while doing so I hope to spark the dying zeal I so enthusiastically started out with!

 I do hope to recover some passion because just weeks ago I pondered again about spirituality and science and how for me they are not mutually exclusive. For me science is not necessary in proving Gods existence, I have all the proof I need, but rather science makes me marvel even more at God's wonderful creativity. Science dissects its intricacies and maybe that is what I have lost sight of.

We have already established that the earth is an old, old, old earth. It is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old! That is as old as anything we can comprehend. So to ponder this old earth is to ponder the many, many, many changes the earth has undergone, not to mention the infinite amount of living organisms that have graced this green/blue planet.

 It is no wonder that a huge part of Geology is the time scale…when did all of this happen? What age is this rock and what does it mean? A big part of a geologist job is to discover when something happened and what it tells us about the earth’s history.  As ego centric as humans can be, it might be hard to imagine a day on our planet without us, but there was a time, a very long time when we were not around.

When I was kid I wanted to be an archeologist or maybe it was a paleontologist, because I didn’t know the difference, but no matter, I wanted to dig up old things. I wanted wear khaki pants armed with a tiny brush and meticulously excavate dried bones so that I could tell their story.  Just recently the world’s oldest turtle fossil was found in Poland and paleontologists date it as 215 million years old!!!  They used the surrounding sedimentary rocks to determine its age.

They say the turtle belonged to a species called the Proterochersis robusta and that it roamed the Earth at the same time as the dinosaurs.

They were able to place the turtle in the Norian age, which is a stage of the Triassic period and how they were able to do that is extremely fascinating to me. They found palynomorphs, which are microscopic fossilized plant matter, surrounding the turtle and found out it was a certain kind of pollen with a distinct feature. This pollen must be preserved in water otherwise it would disintegrate.
 Had the turtle not been found at the bottom of a basin covered in water we would not have known what time period this turtle lived in? Isn’t that fascinating?!