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These tiny, elaborate crystalline pointy things are conodonts--mysterious teeth that have fascinated paleontologists for centuries. Dissolve a piece of fossiliferous carbonate rock from the late Precambrian through the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event, and you may find these calcium phosphate teeth lying in the remaining sediment. The conodont animal, long thought to be a worm, may be more like a lancet or lamprey--in other words, immediate kinfolks.
Conodonts are excellent index fossils, whose rapid evolution marks many stages of geologic time. They also change color depending on the temperature their host rock went through during burial and diagenesis (fancy word for "becoming a rock").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conodont
Conodonts are excellent index fossils, whose rapid evolution marks many stages of geologic time. They also change color depending on the temperature their host rock went through during burial and diagenesis (fancy word for "becoming a rock").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conodont
Category Photography / All
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 1280 x 1014px
File Size 391.3 kB
I would guess that if you had enough conodont samples, you could plot the gas/liquid phase boundary in a given field. The difficulty would be in getting enough good conodonts, since people usually don't do cores these days--too damn expensive to trip in and out of the hole just to get a core. I don't know if you could get enough pieces of them out of the rock chips that come up out of the hole, in which case, you'd have to get samples from mudloggers on wells in the area. That's the long answer: the short answer is, yes, I think so, it would be pretty convincing temperature data.
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