apochronaut wrote: ↑Mon Jul 12, 2021 6:09 pm
How big is this thing? Those hairs that show up in the last picture . Those are rigid and static, like little rock protuberances from the main body?
Yea, a bunch of them broke off. My guess is they broke from surface tension as the water level fell. But, even dry, some of them are still rigid and sticking out. If I had to guess, it's about 0.5mm in size. It's like 1/3 of a grain of sand, or basically as small of a dot as a ballpoint pen can make when slightly touching paper, and still visible to the naked eye. Seems a bit large, but I've seen larger tardigrades already. I'm not sure how large a ciliate would be able to get. Was hoping the central features could be linked to a known species. I'm picturing those pores being food vacuoles, and the inner flower petal structures possibly being remnants of a nucleus or something.
It looks like it had to be something living at some point. I flipped it over and looked at the underside. It's completely smooth with no pores. I wonder if it was perhaps recessed inside a larger rock, and maybe that is how the cilia survived long enough to fossilize and not erode or break sooner. This is all speculation, as I am new and have no clue what I found. With different lighting, I was able to see what appears to be the cilia extruding from within the pellicle-like outer layer.
