A mysterious exhibit was transferred to the State Museum of the State Cultural Center of Turkmenistan. This is a rock sample with imprints of an unknown ancient organism. The age of the newly discovered exhibit is about 80 million years. Such prints had not previously been found on the territory of Turkmenistan, so the sample was of interest to the museum’s researchers.
The prints look like networks of hexagons with a diameter of 8–12 mm, resemble a honeycomb and occupy an area of 130–150 cm2.
As reported in the “Neutral Turkmenistan” newspaper, the fossil was found by environmental scientist Valery Ivanovich Kuznetsov in Western Kopetdag at the foot of the Sunt-Hasardag ridge, in the vicinity of the city of Magtymguly. Marine sedimentary deposits of the Upper Cretaceous, which are 60–80 million years old, are common here.
The mystery of the find was helped to unravel by Dmitry Viktorovich Grigoriev, candidate of biological sciences, researcher at the Paleontological Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who reported the following:
“The ordered hexagonal structure suggests the biological origin of the object. According to modern ideas, such traces could have been left by primitive organisms, the role of which is claimed by sponges, algae and large deep-sea protists. The fossilized result of the life activity of this organism is similar to Paleodictyon Meneghini, named after the discoverer, paleontologist Giuseppe Meneghini, who in 1850 discovered and classified strange traces in Mesozoic sediments. A network of hexagons, similar to a honeycomb, covered the stone. Today, several hundred such finds are known”.
The new exhibit will take its place among other fossils. The museum presents a fairly rich collection of paleontological objects. Here you can see a 270-million-year-old petrified tree trunk, fossilized forms of prehistoric sea urchins and crinoids, ammonites, belemnites, bivalves and gastropods, as well as whole shark teeth, corals, dinosaur tracks and ferns dating back to the Mesozoic era. The Cenozoic era includes fossilized traces of a dromedary camel, a Turkmen elephant skull, a Hazar elephant tooth, southern elephant tooth enamel, ostrich egg shells and other exhibits.
