Belfast, a place that many visit, be it to shop, or sightsee, but if you look deeper into the stone making up the buildings, you start to notice other things. Here we have some fossils. You need to look at the wall on the Howard St side of the building, but if you look up, the whole building is coated in fossils.
A fossil is trace or remains of a plant, animal or other organisms. However, there is more to fossilization than just bones, or remains of a T Rex.
There are many EarthCaches which can teach you about the whole process of fossilization, what we are concerned with is this certain type of fossil.
What we have here is fossilised red algae. Red algae are important builders of reefs, and living examples can be seen on reefs around the world today. Coralline Algae, secrete calcium carbonate, and thus play a major role in the natural contruction of coral reefs. Over time, limestone formed as a sedimentary rock, by the accumulation of coral and sea shells.
Algae give coral reefs their colours, and also supply nutrients, whilst the coral provides shelter to the algae. A study has found evidence of this coral-algae relationship in fossilized coral dating back more than 210 million years to the late Triassic period. Some algae live inside the corals' tissues. The algae use photosynthesis to produce nutrients, many of which they pass to the corals' cells. The corals in turn emit waste products in the form of ammonium, which the algae consume as a nutrient. This relationship keeps the nutrients recycling within the coral rather than drifting away in ocean currents and can greatly increase the coral's food supply. This symbiosis helps in the construction of reefs—corals that host algae can deposit calcium carbonate, the hard skeleton that forms the reefs, up to 10 times faster than non-symbiotic corals.
This is an earthcache. In order to log it, I ask that you answer the below questions. Please send them to me, and do not include them in your log. You can send them to me by using the message facility or email, both of which can be found by looking at my profile.
1. Please describe what can you see, and feel? What shapes are there? What does the rock feel like?
2. What type of rock is this?
3. Please look closely at the fossils, can you see any evidence of plant like material such as curving, or sworling lines?
4. This is a fossil, by reading the above description, to you think that fossils like these could still be forming over time?