Ancient Fossils in the Moscow Metro: Dinosaur Patterns Everyone Can See

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In order to touch the most ancient past and, as if in a time machine, travel back hundreds of millions of years, it is not necessary to watch films. It is enough just to go down to the Moscow metro and take a closer look at the walls and columns. In the mysterious streaks and curls of stone surfaces, to which hurrying passengers usually do not pay much attention, it is quite possible to discern fossils of corals, gastropods, ammonites and nautilus frozen in centuries.

The oldest deposits, which later became the facing stone used in the construction of the metro, are just a storehouse of information about the oldest living organisms that existed on our planet. When sawing and polishing a stone, the creatures frozen in it, which lived on our Earth many millions of years ago, became flat and intricate shapes on a smooth surface.

The remains of fossil organisms from 70 to 300 million years old are usually found in marbled limestone, which in the Soviet years was brought for cladding the internal surfaces of stations from various parts of the Soviet Union, and now Russia.

There are dozens of stations where such patterns are found in the metropolitan subway, and the paleofauna is very diverse. These are coral reefs, and thickets of sea sponges, and all kinds of mollusks, fragments of skeletons of echinoderms and many other contemporaries of dinosaurs. Moreover, you can see the fossils not only at old, but also at new metro stations.

Most of these "figurines" are small, but there are also very large ones (the largest one found in the metro is a shell with a diameter of more than half a meter). In our review - the most common and interesting types of fossils that can be easily found at the stations of the Moscow metro.

Ammonites

These prehistoric molluscs are named after the ancient Egyptian god Amun (Greek Ammon) - sometimes he was depicted with ram's horns, which these shells look like.

Ammonites lived in spiral shells and knew how to swim in water. They existed on our Earth 145-200 million years ago, which means they were contemporaries of dinosaurs.

Unfortunately, ammonites have become extinct long ago, and it is simply incredible that any modern person can see such "samples" in the subway. You need to look for them at three stations of the circular line - Dobryninskaya, Krasnopresnenskaya, Komsomolskaya, and if you change to the blue line, then at Arbatskaya and Elektrozavodskaya. They also meet at a relatively new metro station, Park Pobedy (the same metro line). By the way, its columns are decorated with Italian limestone, which is called Ammonitiko Rosso because of the abundant ancient molluscs found in it.

Nautilus

Nautilus cephalopods, or, as they are also called, boats, are relatives of squids and octopuses. They live in spiral shells and are somewhat similar to ammonites. However, unlike the latter, the nautilus did not become extinct. This is the only genus of the nautiloid subclass that has survived to this day, so it is especially interesting to compare the underground fossils, which are about two hundred million years old, with modern "ships".

For example, there are enough of these mollusks at the Lubyanka and Paveletskaya stations, and the largest nautilus can be seen at the Electrozavodskaya and Ploshchad Ilyicha stations.

By the way, there are a lot of fossils at the Ploshchad Ilyicha station built in the 1970s. For example, you can see many sea lilies there, which look like a scattering of stars in the sky.

Brachiopods

Brachiopod marine shell animals have existed on Earth since the early Paleozoic. Most often they have a thick leg, with which they attach to the seabed.

It is easy to spot such shells, and most often they can be found at the so-called "red marble" stations. For example, they can be found at Electrozavodskaya, Frunzenskaya, Krasnopresnenskaya, Kakhovskaya.

Gastropods

These gastropods are considered to be the ancestors of modern snails, and on the facing surface their slices look correspondingly like a narrow cone-shaped spiral. Some modern snails are very similar to their prehistoric progenitors, but if now gastropods can live on land, then about 200 million years ago they lived only in the sea.

You can see dinosaur era gastropods in marble at such subway stations as Ploshchad Ilyich, Krasnopresnenskaya, Krasnoselskaya, Lenin Library, as well as Trubnaya, Tsvetnoy Boulevard and in the underground passage of Kurskaya.

Sponges

Sponges are the oldest multicellular animals. Nowadays, they are ubiquitous - even in the icy water of the Arctic and Antarctic.

There are many types of sponges of different colors and shapes, but you can see what their ancestors looked like, which appeared on Earth 650 (!) Million years ago, at several stations at once. For example, they come across on "Pervomaiskaya", "Kashirskaya" and "Komsomolskaya-Koltsevaya". True, these specimens are still not so ancient, but somewhat "younger" - they are "only" 145-200 million years old.

By the way, paleontologists cannot identify all the fossils in the Moscow metro. Sometimes on the walls and columns there are contemporaries of dinosaurs that are difficult to identify unambiguously. Researchers can only put forward versions, and this is due, as a rule, to the fact that the fossil object was cut in such a way that it appears in a not very informative perspective.

Bonus

Not everyone knows this, but in the Russian capital, fossils can be seen not only in the subway. The Kulturologia.ru correspondent visited the Moscow office of Mail.ru, where he photographed very high-quality fossils of various species on the floor. In some places they are replaced by quartz and look very beautiful.

During the construction of the metro (for example, when laying tunnels), curious artifacts.