A few days ago, I posted microscopic pictures of a rock that I sent to Angelo. Angelo provided 200X pictures of different parts of the rock and they were fascinating ! But at the time, I didn’t realize how fascinating they actually are. Here’s the main picture that caught my attention.
My note at the time was … this rock is clearly a "twice petrified agate".
OK … I admit it … that note was clearly a half-baked idea. Angelo sent me a picture of the whole rock and I can see now that it’s a chunk of dino bone. Angelo commented in a message, “It’s amazing what the naked eye can’t see!” A-men Angelo! – Here’s the whole rock.
In Reddit posts, I have claimed that since my dad had picked up so much bone in the desert, I knew what dino bone looked like. (Dino bone is one rock I haven’t inherited much of. My dad sold nearly all of it himself.) That’s still true. I still know what bone looks like – from the outside, but evidently not at 200X. I now have a new appreciation of just how amazing Angelo’s pictures are.
I now believe that what I said were “rock chips” in the first photograph above are actually “bone chips”.
If you go to the amazing dino fossil wall at Dinosaur National Monument near Vernal, Utah, you can learn that the reason there are so many dinosaur bones all jammed together in one place is that they were pushed there by water in a bend in an ancient river. Think, “log jam” – except that it’s dino bones instead of logs. Now, if you have ever examined a natural bone that has been sitting out in a wet place somewhere, you will see that it has started to disintegrate and decay. I now believe that I sent a fossilized version of a bone like that to Angelo. Everything else I wrote is still – well, with a little interpretation – valid.
Angelo’s photos are literally thrilling. I’ve always wanted a microscope, now I NEED one for sure.
Makes me want to go slice a few of my dino bones!