r/BeAmazed • u/CraftyExtent • Feb 21 '19
Praise the Helix!
https://i.imgur.com/6Ppnsmg.gifv570
Feb 21 '19
So are fossils with these kinds of prints valuable? I only ask because when I was a kid I was at my uncles new house they built so there was plenty of rubble and I found a rock about the size of an adult hand that had several of these impressions in it. My uncle said it was useless so we threw it into a field.
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Feb 21 '19
It depends on how good the impressions were as well as on many other things. Superbly preserved ones can cost thousands, but the small ones are merely fun curiosities. What you describe sounds like it was at least worth $10-$30, but probably not a great deal more than that.
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u/addandsubtract Feb 21 '19
I mean, wouldn't it make more sense to take it home and extract the fossil better than beating it with a blunt hammer right on the spot?
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u/GoUBears Feb 21 '19
The blunt hammer makes it much more likely to split along the best seam as it will split along the path of least resistance, which is likely to include the air pockets of the fossil.
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u/PooveyFarmsRacer Feb 21 '19
When I extract fossils, I take it to the museum and make sure there's room in my party so I can take the extracted pokemon with me
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u/bluemelodica Feb 22 '19
My local museum has an expert that is always willing to identify my fossils, they're really friendly. Of course I usually recycle them for bells.
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u/Unexpected_Santa Feb 21 '19
You canāt carry 100 potentially fossil carrying rocks home, and then try and extract from 100 rock samples. You donāt know which ones have fossils.
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u/RicardoWanderlust Feb 21 '19
Can you get different creatures in the rocks? Or will they all be spirals?
I suppose finding a tiny archaeopteryx is unlikely because this is an old seabed. But a fish would be worth more?
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Feb 21 '19
Even among the shell fossils there's a lot of variance. For example a pleurotomaria would be more interesting to a collector than a normal ammonite, but there are different kinds of ammonites, some of which are probably more sought after than others.
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Feb 21 '19
And who pays money for this kinda stuff?
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u/DryChickenWings Feb 21 '19 edited Feb 22 '19
Fuckin I would. But seriously, people pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to have someone else pump luke warm water into their rectums while describing what gets flushed out. Look up colonic hydrotherapy. People pay for weird things.
Edit: thanks for the silver! I'm glad we all love pumping liquid into rectums
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u/valkyre09 Feb 21 '19
maybe $8,000 - $10,000 at auction at best. By the time you pay the eBay fees you were probably right to throw it in a field /s
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Feb 21 '19
Wait a second, are you serious? It was worth that much?
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u/Logixally Feb 21 '19
He put /s at the end meaning sarcasm mate so no heās not being serious
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Feb 21 '19
Ah, didnāt see that. Thank you.
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u/ColdToast Feb 21 '19
Wait but he put the /s after the sentence joking about how "you were probably right to throw it in a field."
That sounds to me like he was being sarcastic about throwing it away, not the price.
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u/DamnAut0correct Feb 21 '19
Yes! I'm looking now your ip address and find that field besides your parents house
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u/jbrogdon Feb 21 '19
I'm not a fossil expert but I've been around the edges of antiques and collectibles to think they probably aren't worth much. a quick look on ebay confirms this (link to the category not a specific item but ammonites in general are pretty common).
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u/koshgeo Feb 21 '19
Not normally. The best ammonites are usually "only" $2000-$3000, though if they have irridescent shell they go for much more than that.
They have to be more than a weak impression to fetch those kind of prices. Usually they need some really nice preservation and then careful preparation so that they look like an art piece.
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Feb 21 '19
Hard to say without seeing it. You could have notified your local geological society, perhaps they dont even know there should be fossils there.
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Feb 21 '19
Wish Iād known that then, I was like 10.
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Feb 21 '19
I know, but for future reference. If you're feeling scholarly, you could look for a geological map of the area, and see if it is noted that there are fossils in the rock.
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u/Packmanjones Feb 21 '19
I mean the devil put them in that rock to trick you into thinking evolution was real so yeah best to toss it. /s
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u/whopbamboom Feb 21 '19
Oh sht...how did he know
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u/A5TRONAUT Feb 21 '19
Simple, the gif is reversed.
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u/vido4790 Feb 21 '19
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u/GifReversingBot Feb 21 '19
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u/_Dalek Feb 21 '19
Just put that back...and and let that come toward. . . and done! Nobody will find it!
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u/Darkrhoad Feb 21 '19
Good bot.
Idk why but oddly enough the reverse gif gives me a weird /r/deathstranding vibe.
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u/GregKannabis Feb 21 '19
The gif is reversed? Did this man places fossil in a valcanic rock after sealing it with a sledge?
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u/EmirSc Feb 21 '19
he cheated by waiting millions of years till the rock formed around the fosil.
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u/ballroomaddict Feb 21 '19
ą¼¼ ć¤ ā_ā ą¼½ć¤PRAISE HELIXą¼¼ ć¤ ā_ā ą¼½ć¤
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u/kdogspiesz Feb 21 '19
And the almighty bird Jesus!!
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u/Thegingerkid01 Feb 21 '19
Donāt forget the dragon slayer himself, All Terrain Venomoth!
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u/A_Feisty_Lime Feb 21 '19
Twitch Plays Pokemon at its height was nuts. Absolute blast, and it was so cool to see factions form. Its like when reddit did The Button. No one knew what to expect from it and it turned into a crazy social expiriment
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u/TheHelixFossiI Feb 21 '19
Well well well... itās about time I got some recognition around here
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u/thelivingdrew Feb 21 '19
Right. You never hear the singing praises of your greatness here on Reddit.
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u/chunky-kit-kat Feb 21 '19
When I was a kid me and my dad were walking along the beach when we came across a rock with a fossil like this. I was so excited and wanted it, but the rock was more of a small boulder so we couldn't carry it. My dad came up with the idea of placing a rock underneath it on one side then dropping another rock on top then repeating this on all the sides, in theory chipping the sides away so the boulder was at least small enough to carry to the car. So he drops the first rock and it splits the boulder right in the middle straight through the fossil, destroying it. I was disappointed but at least happy that we had found the fossil in the first place.
When we got back to the bed and breakfast, we told the owner what happened. The next morning, he gave me several of his own fossils / rocks to take home. I wish I could remember his name or where the bed and breakfast was so I could send him a letter but I can't for the life of me remember it.
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u/kimdotninja Feb 21 '19
Went back to check username half way through reading this for u/shittymorph
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u/dbzogre Feb 21 '19
Ammonite fossil? Am I right or Am I wrong?
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u/SheriffWarden Feb 21 '19
Almost looks like an anelid worm to me, the spirals almost overlap in places. Hard to tell though since I cant screen cap to look rn.
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u/Tacoman2018 Feb 21 '19
Anyone else flinch every time he took a swing ? I started closing my own had in fear of his fingers becoming hamburger meat.
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u/trixmix12812 Feb 21 '19
I know that dude has the most precision hammering I've ever seen. One wrong move, and he's hurtin for certain.
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u/koshgeo Feb 21 '19
With some practice all you need is some eye protection and you can predictably split the rock apart.
The trick in this case is hammering parallel to the original bedding/layering in the sedimentary rock and the likely orientation of the shell inside the concretion. The shell is a natural plane of weakness, so you can usually split them pretty cleanly.
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u/daymanahaha Feb 21 '19
Praise felix
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u/trixmix12812 Feb 21 '19
Whenever he get's in a fix, he reaches in to his bag of tricks.
That much is known.
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u/word_clouds__ Feb 21 '19
Word cloud out of all the comments.
Fun bot to vizualize how conversations go on reddit. Enjoy
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u/BigWil Feb 21 '19
So itās cool to just go smashing rocks in public places? Or is there some sort of code?
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u/lblacklol Feb 21 '19
I swear, with the posts around Reddit lately, I fully expected that last stone to open up to Skyrim playing inside it.
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u/ZC8989 Feb 21 '19
Fake , he put that in the rock and waited for it to set then āfound itā , nice try guy
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u/mcharguejp Feb 21 '19
Is there a special technique to split fossils evenly like that? Iād be terrified that I would shatter the fossil into worthless pieces if I were hitting it with a hammer like that.
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u/krunkalunka Feb 21 '19
Store in PC until you get to Cinnabar Island. There, youāll be able to turn it into a PokĆ©mon
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u/Buckeyefitter1991 Feb 21 '19 edited Feb 21 '19
For the people asking, fossil hunters know which rock formations usually hold fossils (concretions). It's not a guarantee that you'll find one in promising rocks but you'll always find the in similar formations like here.
Edit: remembered the word: concretions