The Turtle Moves: On the Track of the Giant Scorpion

28/04/2012

On the Track of the Giant Scorpion

Hello y'all. Today we went on a fabulous walk in beautiful sunshine along part of the Fife Coastal Path to find the fossilized tracks of the Hibberopterus. We've been doing a Geology class since the beginning of this academic year, and our lovely lecturer, Ros, is also a founder member of GeoHeritage Fife, so she let us know about this expedition. What a blast! After a brisk walk and some sliding down a bank, smelling delightfully of wild Hyacinths and Ramsens, we found this wonderful fossilized track of possibly the first aquatic animal to also come out onto land. It was huge - can you see the two sort of dotted lines in the picture above? That's the mark of its claws, and they're about a metre apart. The solid line in between them is the drag of its tail. This fossil is from the Carboniferous period, about 330 million years ago - long before the dinosaurs.

Awesome.

28 Apr 2012 21:17:59 | Geology

2 Comments

That is a very cool fossil! Fab picture, too. x

Posted by: Sarah-painter | 01/05/2012 at 04:37 PM

Yes. Awesome is an over used word. This however would be a case of 'awesome' in the proper dictionary definition sense of 'something that inspires awe' rather than in the more oft misused sense of 'oh, that's quite good'.

Posted by: Ardbeg Dashper-Hughes | 03/05/2012 at 08:36 PM

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