A JOURNEY INTO THE DEEP PAST

How can one start up a historical blog if not “from the beginning”? If we take history in its broadest sense, comprising the events of the time that passed, certain difficulty appears of establishing “the beginning” before which there was nothing and nothing happened. For “regular” historians the task is relatively easy: the beginning was when a human being started to use a tool for the first time some two and a half million years ago. For historians dealing with Pomerania their interest does not usually go beyond the latest deglaciation of the region fourteen thousand years ago.

If we could compress the whole 4.5-billion year history of the Earth into a year, a millennium of statehood of an “average” European country would last merely seven seconds, whereas human presence in Pomerania, after the latest deglaciation, would close up in a minute and a half. And what about “the rest of the year”? What happened in the Massov land “an hour, a week or a month ago”? Or, in a real time, about half a million, 100 million or half a billion years ago?
 

Scandinavian Michelinoceras

For the amateurs of history, and of natural history in particular, I propose in my next few posts a journey in time, … into the depth of the Massovian land. Let the above attached photo of the fossil originating from the Massovian land be a good reason. It represents a creature which lived hundreds million years ago. 

It was a subject to an examination carried out by paleontologists of the Museum of Natural History in Luxembourg. Mr. Robert Weis and Mr. Dirk Fuchs established that it is a phragmocone of the cephalopod order of Orthocerida. It could have lived in the Permian geological period or about 250-300 million years ago and it was probably transported to Pomerania from Scandinavia in the ice sheet of the last glacier. The order existed on Earth from the Ordovician till the Triassic period or 490-200 million years ago. Mr. Harry Mutvei of the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet of Stockholm expressed the opinion, though having seen the photos only, that it is an orthoceras originating probably from Swedish red limestone rocks, dating from the lower or middle Ordovician, thus from about 460 million years ago. 

Please see also the interesting paper titled "The Ordovician Orthoceratite Limestone and the Blommiga Bladet hardground complex at Horns Udde, Öland" by Magnus Eriksson of 2010. The Ordovician ecosystem where the orthoceratites lived in might have looked as depicted below.

Orthoceratite ecosystem in Ordovician

Mr. Jerzy Dzik of the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, who examined orthoceratite fossils contained in the erratic boulders of Northern Poland, confirmed that it is a cephalopod of the Orthocerida order which would rather belong to the genus of Michelinoceras. The fossil was covered with the limestone concretions of the Silurian period, or some 420 million years ago.

I talk about the period of emerging of the European continent in the following posts: "The Massovian Land in the southern seas" and "Turbulent origins of the European continent". Let me just present here the map of T. H. Torsvik i E. F. Rehnström from their publication "The Tornquist Sea and Baltica - Avalonia docking" (2000). It demonstrates the "moment" of convergence of Avalonia and Baltica and the beginning of the process of the fauna interchange between the two pra-continents.

Fauna exchange after Avalonia-Baltica docking

About 160 species of Michelinoceras have been so far identified and classified all over the world. I wonder to what species would the Massovian fossil be assigned or, perhaps, would it constitute a new unknown up to now, species?

Silurian Cephalopods

The extinct family Orthoceratidae belonged to the Cephalopod sub-class named Nautiloidea from which only survived, all living in the Pacific waters, a dozen or so, out of a few thousand of species which were identified in fossils all over the world. The subject of Nautiloids is interessingly treated in the website “Nautiloids: The First Cephalopods”, from which comes the picture aside. 

These animals lived in the so called neritic zone of the continental shelf, so in the shallow waters not exceeding a depth of 200 meters. They were predators which fed on primary fishes, such as a lobe-finned fish, and other small animals. Although the commentary in the film that follows is in Chinese, and the fish presented resembles rather contemporary species, let me join this animation that interestingly reproduces the Ordovician life of the Orthoceratidaes.

Such waters are better oxygenated than those in a deep ocean, mostly because the sunlight penetrates them all the way to the bottom, thus facilitating so called photosynthesis which in turn furnishes energy for developing the phytoplankton, the base of aquatic life and the prime nutrient of the animals that subsequently appeared in the evolution process. The life on Earth had just appeared in the shallow seas, and when our orthoceras was born, it still concentrated there …

I invite you to the next posts of the blog, wherein we shall follow the journey which our cephalopod and the Massovian land travelled in space and time till the present day.
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