Here's Larvitar exploring a fossilized
coral. Found a huge fossilized reef in an offside cliff of the northern alps, which was full of marine fossils from the early Jurassic period.
You can easily recognize the individual polyps of the coral since they formed large calcite crystals giving them a lighter color.
Looks like Larvitar discovered an
ammonite fossil from the early Cretaceous (northern Germany)! As you can see, many ammonites took on weird non-spiraled shell forms during that time period, giving them the name heteromorphs. As far as I can tell, this particular specimen belongs to the Genus
Scaphites.
Interestingly, the surrounding limestone is almost white and practically void of fossils, so it's likely that it formed in an environment far away from the coast which only provided nutrients in the uppermost water layers.
Here's Larvitar closely inspecting a very special and distinctive rock around my home town:
suevite. This rock originates from a meteor impact only 14,5 Ma ago, which shattered and partially melted the underlying country rock. The various rock fragments and molten components were intermixed and distributed over a diameter of almost 100 km before eventually accumulating and forming these rocks.
You can still see the many different lithics in this rock held together by fine glass and ash material. Another defining property is the high porosity, giving them excellent isolating properties as a building material.
Larvitar striking a dynamic pose on a piece of
mica shist from the central alps, that actually dates back to the Precambrian time before any complex lifeforms existed on earth. The mineral mica developed through metamorphic conditions during the orogenetic processes that formed central Europe and much later the Alps, and gives the rock its beautiful gloss. Due to the high fluid content of the sediments, the metamorphic rocks are full of especially large and idiomorphic Garnet and Hornblende crystals, which you can easily collect from the nearby rivers in large numbers (the rocks in the river all have a stunning silvery shine due to the mica, too!).
And it seems as if Larvitar has already found the most unique rock in my collection! This piece of rock was originally just a normal
coral oolithe from the Jurassic time period, where fractured pieces of coral were encased in carbonate and lumped together by diagenetic processes. In the late Jurassic, however, it was apparently unearthed and fell into an anoxic ocean basin, where an exotic ecosystem based on chemosynthesis has established itself. Consequently, the entire surface of the rock was covered in tubeworms which feed on the chemosynthetic bacteria, and was preserved as part of a bigger boulder until I eventually found it in a pit in central Germany.
Here's another image of the fossilized coral, since you can see the surface structure of the rock a bit better here.
And here's Larvitar hiking on a rather weird rock from the northern alps.
Silicate concretions like this one are actually quite common in limestone, but it is the location that makes this rock so special: after climbing up a 100 m high cliff I found it in a formation that has long been considered to not contain any "proper" silicate concretions, so it seems like this particular area represents a local anomaly in the depositional environment that allowed these kind of concretions to grow. Just goes to show how unpredictable to geology of a region, even when well explored, can actually be.
Interestingly, these silicate concretions can alter the ground chemistry in a way that lets completely different plant life flourish than in the more carbonate-dominated areas, so you can actually use the local flora to find these rocks. ;)
An here's one rock that Larvitar has apparently taken a special liking for due to its size. This
fossilized shell of
Inoceramus is from the same location as the
Scaphites fossil in one of the previous pictures, which is weird due to its large size in an environment that apparently supported almost no other lifeforms. According to Wikipedia, the larger size and therefore gills may be a special adaption that helped it to survive in oxygen-deficient waters, but this still doesn't explain where the nutrients would have come from, since the surrounding limestone distinctively lacks organic matter. Supporting the low-oxygen-theory, however, are small spiral-markings on the shell, which must have originated from tube worms which helped decompose the organic matter after the creature's death.
For its dessert, Larvitar has chosen a particularly delicious looking
pumice stone from the canary islands, which are well known for their fluffy texture and a density lower than that of water. The special thing about this one is that it consists of two different types of Lava with very different histories, which can be clearly seen in the contrasting colors. The dark parts have a very primitive source that probably originated more or less directly from the earth mantle, while the lighter areas consist of more derived lava that has accumulated and cooled down in magma chambers in the crust for a much longer time. Somehow, these different lava sources must have connected and mingled over a period of many thousand years, in order to create this fine pattern in the pumice.
And this is my crappy attempt at using a special close-up lense on my handphone camera, which in turn sadly limited the depth of field. However, it allowed me to bring out the colorful light effects on this
obsidian glass a bit better. They are quite common in volcanic fall deposits, so nothing really special, so it's mostly just here to justify making use of that special lense, haha. ;)
Ahh, yes. The Larvitar figure actually came complete with an own Substitute doll, so I had to include it as well! Here they are trying to replicate the
official pose on the packaging. ^^