Fossils found in Germany's Posidonia Shale don't get their gleam from fool's gold after all.
It was long thought that pyrite — a shiny mineral also known as fool's gold — was the special ingredient that gave fossils embedded in Germany's Posidonia Shale their golden glow. But now scientists think something else is causing these fossils to shimmer.
Once the team viewed the roughly 183 million-year-old fossils using a high-powered scanning electron microscope, they struggled to find any pyrite in the fossils poking out of the black shale, according to a study published in the March 2023 edition of the journal Earth-Science Reviews . After analyzing roughly 70 specimens, it was clear that while the shale surrounding the fossils was"dotted with microscopic clusters of pyrite crystals, called framboids," it was phosphate minerals with yellow calcite that were the source of the fossils' golden glow, according to a statement ."The framboids look like tiny raspberries," study co-author Sinjini Sinha , a doctoral candidate in the Jackson School of Geosciences at UT, told Live Science.
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