THE FOSSIL STORY

[Music] the Grand Canyon of the Colorado massive rocks carved into stony corridors by turbulent waters [Music] this is not only one of the great spectacles of all time but actually a monument to time itself [Music] it is a monument a mile high a monument 1 billion 500 million years old since prehistoric times these granite rocks have faced the Sun and rain the hurricane and flood they have been stony silence watched the forward progress of a changing world in stony silence yes but sealed deep within them is the strange and fascinating story of the wonderful things they've seen [Music] the layers of blocker like the pages of an ancient book and the story these pages have to tell can be understood by those who learn the secret of their language the symbols of that language are fossil a simple fern that grew and flourished 140 million years BC the fossil of a fish that swam the ocean 300 million years ago ancient remnants of long ago carrying with them through the centuries the secrets of life long past fossil leaves and fossil birds the footprint of a dinosaur the fossilized remains of holes were prehistoric worms once crawled these are records which not only trace the time of infinite history but also our times and the modern world we live in most of the essentials of our everyday living the luxuries we take for granted and even our security depend largely on our supplies of petroleum and in the constant search for new sources of oil fossils are useful tool when a prospective field is being explored the drill which grinds thousands of feet down into the earth seeks out these telltale signs at selected intervals the drill is raised the dirt and rock which had been forced into the hollow bit are carefully removed this material is called the drill core in portable laboratories right at the site of the test or exploration well the core is carefully examined the fossils found provide important clues telling the geologist whether he is drilling above in or below the strata in which he expects to find oil vital information difficult to obtain by other means thus the knowledge gained from the study of fossils speeds and increases the effectiveness of man's exploration for more and more oil and so our lives today are influenced by a chapter of the fossil story written in the pages of the earth many millions of years ago nearly everything we have learned of the past from fossils is due to scientists called paleontologists in far-off places desert wastes or inaccessible mountain ranges and sometimes at the risk of their lives they search for fossils which may expand and increase our knowledge of the past and make it live again they work with precision instruments and surroundings where steam shovels and bulldozers would seem more appropriate such elaborate and deliberate care may seem exaggerated but skillful handling is essential if fossils are to be extracted in a recognizable condition from the entombing rock but wherever man probes the surface of the earth either with heavy machinery or with hand tools only a few yards from his own back door he may find some hidden record linking the long distant past with the living presence for fossils our remains of animals and plants that lived in the geologic past and have been preserved occasionally fossils may be the actual bones of some ancient animal but usually chemical change has slowly turned the bones to storm or created an everlasting cast sometimes merely a footprint has been preserved or the imprint of the leaf or the delicate trace read of an insects wings the oldest race of life on mother earth has been found in limestone rocks like these evidence of this life in the form of algae may be found today long after its death perhaps as long ago as 1 billion 500 million years an almost inconceivable period of time in relation to which the last two thousand years amount to less than one minute and an hour not more than a hundred thousandth part of a second so don't be annoyed if your wife is late for that outing at the beach ten minutes don't be impatient what's a half a millionth of a second between husband and wife and remember two of the time it took to make your shiny new car that streamlined steel and chrome was made possible by tiny vegetables that died only some 750 million years ago [Music] yes the iron which mixed with other materials makes the brilliant coloring in these rocks also makes the steel of your car it was accumulated by small bacteria like vegetables which once lived in the quiet waters of peaceful lakes and pools iron salts which had dissolved in the water were changed by these tiny organisms into a form of iron which would not dissolve thus my newt particles of solid iron ore were formed by the bacteria and deposited by them in the bottom of the sea living and dying for millions of years in inconceivable numbers these tiny plants caused the accumulation of beds of iron ore in some places thousands of feet thick and gave the world much of its supply of iron so in the opening chapters of the fossil story we find the first hint of an immense plan a plan which permits us to build our modern world on life that existed seven and a half million centuries ago [Music] then the next chapter of the fossil story tells us about the development of life some 500 million years ago these rocks were far beneath the surface of primordial ocean and there is no present trace that at that time life existed outside the waters but seaweed much as we see it today was a common plant this fossil seaweed once lived in the same waters with the earliest forms of animal life such as these fossil trilobite hard shell creatures on the order of crabs and lobsters [Music] then after about another 80 million years the oceans were teeming with elementary animal life various types of coral as well as by valves and other forms of marine life then these fossil footprints tell one of the great stories of all time they were made by the first air-breathing land animal a scorpion quite similar to those still living today their ancestors were the first animals to venture from the Seas and seek their entire existence on the land the first to breathe the air and warm their bodies in the Sun that was about 375 million years ago in the following million centuries plant life spread across the base of the dry land and plant fossils revealment forests of strange trees and ferns flourished and grew weird and eerie Sentinels silent and except for the story they have left behind imprinted in the rocks life in the sea was also developing fish like animals with backbones and skeletons within their bodies began to appear some of them assumed fantastic sizes and shapes like strange creatures from a far distant land [Music] and then at a time about 250 million years ago many parts of the globe looked like this it was the time of the great amphibians animals that live both in the water and on the land the plants of this period have been turned by change in time into coal but strange as these days were they held it wonders even more strange in the 100 million years to follow the reign of the dinosaurs giant reptiles almost beyond the realm of imagination think of a world filled with creatures towering above the level of a three-story building and weighing more than 20 tons it must have been a frightening place in which to live some types of dinosaurs grew heavy plates of protective board turning their bodies into armored tanks some were harmless vegetarian giants that browse peacefully on the shrubs and trees of their time trees which like these beasts now to our fossils the most beautiful fossils in the world from shining black to purest wipe these petrified trees contain all the delicate colors of the rainbow they were born here by floods drifted into shallow lagoons and were buried in the sand then the alkaline waters of the desert deltas soaked through the sands replaced the word molecule by molecule with silica in such a way as to preserve every cellular structure even the growth rings the action of wind and rain has eroded the rock at earth which once covered these logs of fossil wood turned by nature into storm and by man into semi precious jewel on agrees and Jazmyn chalcedony and carnelian Chris appraise and agates beautiful fossils to adorn lovely lady's relics of life 180 million years ago and yet animals which roam the mountains in the lowlands as recently as 40,000 years ago are now extinct in what is now Los Angeles many of them blundered into the natural crafts of the La Brea targets the bodies of the animals sank below the surface their flesh decayed but their skeletons remained intact that is why excavation of these pits appealed at the largest collection of Ice Age mammals ever discovered there were slow-moving sloths fast running camels and fierce flesh-eating Birds there were large dire wolves and the terrible saber-toothed Tigers kings of an animal Empire now banished [Music] yet strangely enough some animals very much alive today can trace their ancestry for millions of years directly back to the first mammals in the world marsupials which carried their young and approached the lay Muir the first of the monkey like animals but in the laboratory there are even stranger things to be seen descendants of tiny marine animals called foraminifera their ancestors formed the seas hundreds of millions of years ago when they died countless billions of their bodies settled in layers of sediment thousands of feet deep and became fossils today we find these fossils frequently in the form of limestone jaw marble they also give us calcium and phosphorus and they form the major component of cement fossils like gold or where you find them under the ground or on top of it in far-off places or in your own backyard this is diatomaceous earth made up of the fossils of diatoms that floated in the ocean 20 million years ago soft and very light there are 40 millions of them in a cubic inch but the most important thing about them that is that they are extremely porous so after processing and refining to remove impurities they serve mankind in many and varied ways particularly as filtering agents do they affect our daily layers they are used in the refining of sugar and the manufacture of countless other everyday household items such as soap [Music] mouthwash and lotion and life-saving drugs [Music] even though the diatoms are so minut that they can be seen only under the microscope not only is constant research discovering more and more uses for them but intricate machines have been designed which assort these tiny plant fossils according to the various shapes and microscopic sizes [Music] and here are the living descendants of the diatom today they are called grass of the sea because they provide aquatic animals with much of their food even the gigantic whale dines and deep-sea luxury on these tiny plants they multiply so rapidly that a single cell becomes a billion within a month but the truly amazing thing is that each of these tiny plants contains an even tinier drop of oil which it carries to the bottom of the sea when it dies and it is believed that much of our life petroleum comes from these fossil diatoms and so the cycle is complete fossils stored the oil forests in secret pools baby theory and when the need arises fossils guide us in our search to find yes the cycle is complete and as always we find that nature's plan is quite perfect it is a plan told us by the story of the fossils in silent rocks it is a story of a world a story of constant change a story of a living present founded on a past that never truly dies [Music] you [Music]