Skolithos

Skolithos tubes, the filling of which has been thundered out of the rock. A rather atypical form of tradition.

Skolithos (also Scolithus ) is the generic name of a trace fossil . It is derived from the ancient Greek words for "stake" (σκῶλος, skolos ) and "stone" (λίθος, lithos ) and goes back to Samuel Stehman Haldeman .

They are cylindrical, always unbranched, living tubes with a diameter of mostly 2 to 4 mm, which run perpendicular to the stratification and were probably created by suspension-eating worms. It is noteworthy that these tubes sometimes appear en masse, close together in the rock. The trace genera Monocraterion , Tigillites and Cylindricum , which were established for morphologically more or less identical fossil traces of life, are commonly used as synonyms for Skolithos .

Skolithos occurs worldwide in marine and fluvial sandstones of various ages and is characteristic of high-energy (i.e. influenced by strong wave movements or currents) deposition areas.

A well-known location of these fossils is in the Scottish highlands . There are Cambrian quartzites minded , in which up to 35 cm long Skolithos occur frequently and facilities warehouse very crowded. The corresponding rock is therefore also referred to as pipe rock (English pipe "tube", rock "rock, rock"). It is not uncommon to find Cambrian rubble made of sandstone in northern Germany , which comes from Scandinavia, is full of Skolithos tubes and is called Scolithic sandstone or Skolithos sandstone .

• Scolite sandstone attachments
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  Large quartzite debris from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania

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  Handpiece from the Münsterländer gravel sand train

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  Handpiece from the island of Poel

literature

• RG Bromley: Trace Fossils: Biology, Taphonomy, and Applications. Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg 1999, ISBN 3-540-62944-0 .
• U. Lehmann: Paleontological dictionary. Stuttgart 1977, ISBN 3-432-83572-8 .
• K. Hucke: Introduction to bed load research. Oldenzaal 1967.
• KJ Woolfe: Trace fossils as paleoenvironmental indicators in the Taylor Group (Devonian) of Antarctica. In: Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. Volume 80, 1990, pp. 301-310, ISSN  0031-0182 , doi: 10.1016 / 0031-0182 (90) 90139-X .
• B. Engmann: Skolithos - fascinating traces of life from an unknown producer. In: fossils. Issue 4/2012, pp. 250-252, ISSN  0175-5021 .

Web links

• Scolite sandstone - fossilized worm tubes . Collection item of the month June 2003 on the website of the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR)
• Quartz sandstone with vertical burrows, Cambrian Pipe Rock from the series of images Rocks of NW Scotland on the website of the Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford

Individual evidence

1. ^ SS Haldeman: A monograph of the Limniades and other freshwater univalve shells of North America. Philadelphia 1840.