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A JOURNEY INTO THE DEEP PAST

How can one start up a historical blog if not from the beginning? If we take history in itsbroadest sense, comprising the events of the time that passed, certain difficulty appears ofestablishing the beginning before which there was nothing and nothing happened. Forregular historians the task is relatively easy: the beginning was when a human being startedto use a tool for the first time some two and a half million years ago. For historians dealingwith Pomerania their interest does not usually go beyondthe latest deglaciation of the regiontwelve thousand years ago.

If we could compress the whole 4.5-billion year history of the Earth into a year, a millenniumof statehood of an average European country would last merely seven seconds, whereashuman presence in Pomerania, after the latest deglaciation, would close up in a minute and ahalf. And what about the rest of the year? What happened in the Massov land an hour, aweek or a month ago? Or, in a real time, about half a million, 100 million or half a billionyears ago?

For the amateurs of history, and of natural history in particular,I propose in my next few posts a journey in time, into the depth of the Massovian land. Letthe aside attached photo of the fossil originating from the Massovian land be a good reason. It

represents a creature which lived hundreds million year ago. It was a subject to anexamination carried out by paleontologists of the Museum of Natural History in Luxembourg.Mr. Robert Weis and Mr. Dirk Fuchs established that it is a phragmocone of the cephalopodorder ofOrthocerida. It could have lived in the Permian geological period or about 250-300million years ago and it was probably transported to Pomerania from Scandinavia in the icesheet of the last glacier. The order existed on Earth from the Ordovician till the Triassic

period or 490-200 million years ago. Mr. Harry Mutvei of the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet ofStockholm expressed the opinion, though having seen the photos only, that it is an orthocerasoriginating probably from Swedish red limestone rocks, dating from the lower or middleOrdovician, thus from about 460 million years ago. Mr. Jerzy Dzik of the Institute ofPaleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, who examined orthoceratide

fossils contained in the erratic boulders of Northern Poland, confirmed that it is a cephalopodof the Orthocerida order which would rather belong to the genus ofMichelinoceras. The fossilwas covered with the limestone concretions of the silurian period, or some 420 million yearsago. About 160 species of Michelinoceras have been so far identified and classified all overthe world. I wonder to what species would the massovian fossil be assigned or, perhaps,would it constitute a new unknown up to now, species?

The extinct family Orthoceratidaebelonged to the Cephalopoda sub-class named Nautiloideafrom which only survived, all living in the Pacific waters, a dozen or so, out of a few thousandof species which were identified in fossils all over the world. The subject of Nautiloids isinteressingly treated in the website Nautiloids: The First Cephalopods, from which comes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Glacial_Maximumhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Glacial_Maximumhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthocerashttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthocerashttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelinocerashttp://www.tonmo.com/science/fossils/nautiloids.phphttp://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HNugcRveQN0/Su2ULfjXCVI/AAAAAAAAAcY/jxZguDh92b4/s1600-h/Orthoceras+from+Pomerania+003.JPGhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthocerashttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelinocerashttp://www.tonmo.com/science/fossils/nautiloids.phphttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Glacial_Maximum

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the picture aside. These anim als lived in the so called nerithiczone of the continental shelf, so in the shallow waters not exceeding a depth of 200 meters.Such waters are better oxygenated than those in a deep ocean, mostly because the sunlight

penetrates them all the way to the bottom, thus facilitating so called photosynthesis which inturn furnishes energy for developing thephytoplankton, the base of aquatic life and the primenutrient of the animals that subsequently appeared in the evolution process. The life on Earthhad just appeared in the shallow seas, and when our orthoceras was born, it still concentratedthere

I invite you to the next posts of the blog, wherein we shall follow the journey which our

cephalopod and the Massovian land travelled in space and time till the present day.

November 1, 2009

http://massovia-pomerania.blogspot.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoplanktonhttp://massovia-pomerania.blogspot.com/http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HNugcRveQN0/Su2W-HLdf0I/AAAAAAAAAcg/3x8lGhf2N8o/s1600-h/Scene+from+Ordovician+seafloor.jpghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoplanktonhttp://massovia-pomerania.blogspot.com/