{"id":163319,"date":"2023-05-04T13:23:39","date_gmt":"2023-05-04T18:23:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/beautiful-golden-fossils-reveal-process-of-fossilization-183-million-years-ago"},"modified":"2023-05-04T13:23:39","modified_gmt":"2023-05-04T18:23:39","slug":"beautiful-golden-fossils-reveal-process-of-fossilization-183-million-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/beautiful-golden-fossils-reveal-process-of-fossilization-183-million-years-ago","title":{"rendered":"Beautiful Golden Fossils Reveal Process Of Fossilization 183 Million Years Ago"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/beautiful-golden-fossils-reveal-process-of-fossilization-183-million-years-ago2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>All that glitters isn\u2019t usually <a href=\"http:\/\/www.iflscience.com\/tags\/gold\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">gold<\/a>, and the same is true for 183 million-year-old fossils found in the Posidonia Shale. Moreover, while the researchers used to think the shiny gold coating on the fossils was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.iflscience.com\/how-to-tell-real-gold-from-fool-s-gold-67378\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fool\u2019s gold<\/a>, new research has revealed a more surprising answer.<\/p>\n<p>The Posidonia Shale in southwest Germany is the source of many of these golden-hued fossils, particularly those of soft-bodied sea life such as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.iflscience.com\/massive-bigfin-squid-spotted-in-extremely-rare-deep-sea-sighting-68366\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">squid<\/a> and ichthyosaur embryos that were around in the early Jurassic. These geological deposits containing soft-bodied preserves are known as Konservat-Lagerst\u00e4tten and are extremely rare.<\/p>\n<p>Previously it was thought that anoxic conditions helped to fossilize these specimens. While pyrite, also known as fool\u2019s gold, was thought to be the source of this shine, a closer inspection has revealed more about the conditions in which these fossils were formed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>All that glitters isn\u2019t usually gold, and the same is true for 183 million-year-old fossils found in the Posidonia Shale. Moreover, while the researchers used to think the shiny gold coating on the fossils was fool\u2019s gold, new research has revealed a more surprising answer. The Posidonia Shale in southwest Germany is the source of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}