I found a fossil, in a river ,in a high mountain area?

Question

I found a fossil in a river,in a mountain wilderness area.It was a group of SandDollars ,(maybe 20) that were perfectly shaped. They were all on top of each other like layers on a cake.The Sanddollars had turned to rock.What's so weird, is they where so perfectly shaped.You could see every little detail of them.We also found numerous other shell fossils. What do you think happened? I've never seen so many Sanddollars piled up in one place before.

Answer 1

Sand dollars live in large deposits in the ocean and when they die they make huge shell deposits. I have seen banks of thousands off them at the shore. They fossilized just as you found them. A chunk of a fossilized deposit was eroded from a larger deposit upstream from where you were. Go back, go upstream and LOOK for the mother deposit. Might be fun.

Answer 2

there are a lot of possiblities to your answer without seeing stratigraphic maps of the area or a lithography it is a little hard to say. You can speculate a lot if you know the specific type of rock that the fossil are found in, the age of the rock, ect. This Gives you the ability to create a good idea of the anciet environment that the fossil came from. Once you know what environment they came from, you can see what happened.

If the sand dollars were found outside of the rock, then it is possible that someone was there before you and piled them in an easily accessable area.

The sand dollar got on the mountain range because sometime in the past the rock that they are in was part of a vast marine environment (under water) This is sedimentary rock formed from millions of years of sediment being deposited on the bottom of the ocean floor. The sediment was then probably compacted and cemented together forming some type of sandstone that trapped the dead organisms inside. This rock would then be moved by techtonic action, and then uplifted when two techtonic plate collided. That is what formed your mountain range. A convergent plate boundary where one layer of rock is pushed up while the other is pushed down (called a subduction zone)
This forces the mountain to get taller. What mountain did you find it in? If it is in the US, millions of years ago much of the US was covered by a shallow ocean before the last ice age. This is called a high sea level episode. During the Triassic period of time much of the Western US was a vast desert because it was closer to the equator (around 20º-30º latitude.)

This is why the ocean organisms were in your mountains, as to why they were stacked, well, could be many many reasons, but probably someone put there there to come back and get some later. (if they were fond outside the rock) If inside a rock and stacked on one another probably a reproduction chain, or just random stacking from folding in the rock.

Answer 3

It sounds like what you found may part of a fossil called a crinoid, which are very common fossils in many localities in North America. If it looks like lifesavers staked on top of each other, I bet that is what it is. Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crinoid

During the geologic past, many rocks in North America were formed underwater where soon to be fossils were made. Due to changes in climate and tectonics, many were uplifted and now fossils wash out.

Answer 4

How big were they? If they are small (less than 1 cm), they are most likely a crinoid stem, an encinoderm, which is the group of organisms that includes sand dollars.

Well, regardless, you have marine rocks that are old (probably over 100 million years old) that have been thrusted up to make a mountain. Where did you find them?

Answer 5

The only way any life can climb a mountain is if it has legs.So if you found the remains of a fossilized clam it means that in prehistory they must have had legs.

Answer 6

Those are my teeth

Answer 7

Idk but it sounds cool.