What a surprisingly thrilling fossil! The jump from "we don't know what this is" to "oh, it looks like it's still alive today" to "but....we still can't figure out what it is..." our world is just so endlessly mysterious and exciting!
Something I think is interesting is that it could be made from frequency given off from earth. At the bottom of the ocean we see this perfect hexagonal pattern formed near the surface and requires not much weight to be on to so it can form. At the surface land level bees form perfect hexagonal designs and studies on how bees inform other members of the hive where flowers are is done through a "dance" where they state that clockwise and counterclockwise rotation plus the time taken to do this give direction but, they also shake during this which isn't mentioned as useful even though to me bees would navigate using 3 points since they fly. Finally perfect snowflakes also form symmetrical hexagonal patterns as they form in the atmosphere.
@@CryAnalog Basalt erodes in hexagonal columns as well (think "Devil's Tower" & Giant's Causeway). Then there's the hugest hexagon in the solar system on the north pole of Saturn! What's up with nature settling into hexagons?
Fish egg beds. Squishy spheres aligned together will make that pattern. Think on it. You're welcome, - Not my real name, attribute "in honor of Da Vinci"
Hell, people can't even accept the fact transgender people are born. It amazes me how ignorant most people are and how truly little we know even about the human race.
Hexagonal stacking is actually the most physically efficient pattern. If you put a bunch of round bubbles together, they will actually make this pattern.
@@TheTuxedoCreeper Yes that is there and completely expected based on how thermal convection works. You can see the same effect in some cloud formations from a passenger jet looking down.
I'm swiss and I've found a rock with this honeycomb pattern while hicking in the alps. I thought it was a piece of concrete from a bunker or something like that. I never thought it was a fossil.
@@WeWereOnline Actually, unless it was somewhere where buildings were or had been, it most likely wasn't. And given that people hiking in the Alps are statistically far more likely to be in areas where there aren't buildings in their locale, then it's also more likely not to be from a building.
They know the source they just havent seen the organism becaus its so far down under the mud at rhe bottom of the sea. But they know it creates the pattern. They just havent seen it out from under the mud.
One of my favorite fossils, because ot literally represents what's fascinating about paleontolgy: it's like being a detective of the natural science, putting together the little clues you have to solve mysteries sometimes as old as life itself.
@@wallylasd Or they are related to things that have realized that hexagons are one of only three geometrical figures with which you can tile an even surface completely. :) (The other two being squares and triangles.)
@@PondScummer To be fair going far enough back they should be related to bees, palm trees and fungi etc. As far as we know everything traces back to a common ancestor but yeah there is no way this is an insect arthropod... heck in all likelihood it probably isn't an animal at all since multicellularity doesn't appear to be hard to evolve if a suitable evolutionary driver supports it.
That's hilarious, every single time I'm nerding out about how little we know about the ocean I also need to include a little 'but not megalodon' because everybody's so hell bent on insisting it might still be out there
Every time I talk to my grandmother about extinct animals I preface with "it is no longer alive" and she still tries to say it could still be out there.
@@boyinblue. I mean technically she has a point there have been multiple examples of species thought to be extinct, just for scientist to find the animals years sometimes decades later.
@@cwillis92 She is one of the Bigfoot crazed people, she keeps telling me that she thinks mammoths are in the artic causing earthquakes. I'm pretty sure her points are just coming from those paranormal shows.
@@boyinblue. aww yea that's a bit much. It's always crazy how even the most logical ideas can still lead us to some of the most illogical ideas in other areas of life lol
This is gonna sound crazy but I have been thinking about this for a long time. There are other hexagons in nature - think Devil's Causeway and honeycomb. Here's the thing, if circles are packed touching each other and they expand, they turn into hexagons. There is an easy experiment you can try at home. Get a tube of refrigerator biscuits - not homemade, they have to be perfect circles - put them in a baking pan where they just touch. Bake them and when you take out the pan - hexagonal biscuits. My theory is that you end up with hexagons in nature because there was something there that was originally round - a round organism, a tube, a drop of water, an air bubble. Then they either expand or contract - Devil's Causeway - and voila hexagons. Is it possible that some of this stuff is merely geometry at work in nature.
You just gave me an idea. If biscuits were cut into hexagons instead of circles, there wouldnt be waste dough between the biscuits when they are cut out.
You could have written something a lot more crazy than that. Perhaps there's evidence out there that the source of the fossils is organic, but I wonder if it's not even produced by an organism, but by crystallization of some sort. It would be a bit more surprising if the modern things on the sea floor weren't made by an organism, though.
And many places with basaltic columns. You can find them in multiple places in the US; including the Devil’s Tower which is composed of such basaltic columns. I have been a number of places where they can be found on the side of the road where a highway has been cut right through them.
It's the crazy "We have no idea" stuff that makes my ears perk up. I loved the feeling when we found the first planet(s). It is a life experience to go from "We don't know" to "We found an answer" .. Great job as always Kelli (and yes, I know I probably spelled that wrong).
These videos have end credits with the names of all the people who worked on them if you're curious. They list "Kallie Moore" as one of the hosts, that must be her [seems they don't change the credits per episode to reflect who the current host was]
I found an ancient ocean basin above my house in the hills , I found many fossils and won an award for them at high school. I also found many hexagon fossils as well. I never knew what caused them…until now
Being a protist doesn't mean it's necessarily related to algae and amoebas. it's just the box we throw everything into when it's not an animal, plant. fungus, bacteria, or archaea.
It’s actually not too unbelievable when you think of the geometric shapes that appear in molecules (such as carbon rings), or especially the hexagonal shape of honeycomb. Now I’m just a curious as to what made this!
honeycomb is right. contrary to popular opinion, bees do not make honeycomb structures; they make round structures which, when they crowd in on each other, become hexagonal.. i wonder if a similar process is at work here.
o think it has something to do with the stability of the angles inside, although, when you study carbon rings deeper, you learn that they arent exact hexagons, they have boat and hat arrengements, cause molecules are 3D
@@pbajnow Saturn's pole has a pentagonal ring caused by a double vortex. Oddly, we know what causes that, but not the ocean floor hexagons. Jupiter has a hexagonal pole vortex. It's remarkable such huge shapes exist in nature. And how small these shapes get too, atomic scale. This one is a puzzler. Hopefully we don't drive it to extinction before we figure out what caused these hexagons
These are likely formed like honeycomb. They are not formed in a hexagonal shape. They are circles placed next to each other and the tension creates the hexagon
I found paleodyction in core CT scans. Pyrite formed in the fossil which highlighted highlighted it in CT. As I was viewing the scans, I saw the flashes of hexagonal patterns with depth. It was thrilling.
I don't suppose you have any images or footage of that? Because if you do, and you're at liberty to share them, I imagine that'd look super interesting! And who knows, it might give someone more educated than I some ideas they hadn't thought of yet ;)
I've found similar specimens in Utah near an extinct hot spring/ volcanic dome. The rocks are travertine calcite, and contain traces of petrified and/or mummiffied plant materials. The area was notably under water during deposition and would have been a geothermal vent where the specimens were found.
Maybe they are extremophiles, flourishing inside volcanic vents and expanding out to the surrounding sea floor at times when the water is heated during periods of volcanic activity. When the water cools, or maybe when some vented material dissipates, they retreat back into the vents or die off.
Maybe when a hot spring or vent brings up certain sulfur compounds or petroleum, this creature colonizes the area, scavenging the chemicals as its food source. It could even be a familiar organism that changes its behavior to build the hexagon structures only in certain scenarios to take advantage when an underwater eruption provides its favorite food. Or maybe it builds and uses the structures as a survival tactic only when food is particularly scarce or the environment is hostile. Maybe when exposed to rising levels of toxic gases, it builds the hexagons as a filtered environment to live in until a return to more livable conditions.
@@_Painted I've thought maybe they are a crustacean that built hives similar to a wasp/muddobber that would have, as you said, sought food sources around geothermal vents. Or perhaps even some kind of organized microbial colonies or some kind of coral-like organism. Hard to say, but I tend to believe it is biological in origin.
This story of elusive sub-surface organisms reminds me of my experiences as a kid on the beaches of Georgia and its neighboring states: These beaches had common things that would squirt water (actually usually a mixture of water and sand) up after a wave would retract . . . and no matter how hard I tried I could never find the responsible organism. I also noticed that the beaches had plenty of tiny rapidly burrowing clams (Donax variabilis?), which would be plausible candidates for a squirting organism, but these didn't seem to do that.
All PBS Eons videos are pretty good, but for this one, the sound design really shines. The music is so fitting for the subject matter. Great job to the sound editor!
I have a few fossils that have this honeycomb pattern. there are relatively common where I live in southern Indiana. I put them in vinegar overnight and it really exposes the individual cells and remnants of what was inside them. Great video 🙂👍 Edit: Just to be clear, the fossils I’m referring to are not fossils of the same creature featured in this vid, it just has the same honeycomb pattern ✌️🙂
@@PerfectionHunter for some reason I can’t say goo gull in the comments or it gets erased. This will be the third time I’ve tried to reply to you. Search the G word for “fossils in vinegar” or something similar. It’s commonly used to clean and/or expose fossils
I remember watching an IMAX movie about an expedition to find these guys probably 15 years ago, but I could never remember the name "paleodictyon" and I was beginning to think the entire thing was a dream, until just now with this vid.
I found a stone with the honeycomb pattern on my farm in Alabama. I believe the rocks there were from an ancient mud flat that may had hosted sea life and or simply foamed with bubbles that became stone. A lot of conglomerate there so it developed around different geological events.
I found a couple interesting specimens near Bismarck, ND, where there was once a large inland ocean. I thought they were honeycombs, but seeing as how they were found with a variety of other marine fossils, it must be Paleodictyon! One of the ones I found is even agatized!
@@WanderTheNomad *appear equally possible The rules, while including things like observer effects, are not themselves subject to observation effects. The right answer was right the whole time, it only appeared to be as likely as the other wrong answers. The difference is subtle, but important.
@@WanderTheNomad in a surprising plot twist, semantics are important. It’s literally how any of us can convey information reliably. (Yes. It is 100% semantics. Feel free to ignore the rest) That said, I’ll try and make more sense. The original phrasing you used implies that the rules of physics become concrete and definite when observed, which is something you should avoid implying about a rule set that includes literal changes based on if something is observed or not. Double slit experiment, electron uncertainty, quantum states changing between entangled particles, things of that nature. It muddies the waters a bit, and I kinda feel like a lot of modern problems could be significantly mitigated if we were all sorta just better at communicating. So I make a lot of semantic arguments and meta arguments about other peoples arguments to people on TH-cam. It’s basically trolling, but in a way that hopefully makes people better at communicating.
I was about to comment something like: We will never know what could possibly have made such strange fossils. Then a miracle happens, the strange animal actually is still alive among us (Edit: we might have to improve our mining craft in order to excavate these seemingly fallen guys out of their sub-aquatic forts at night), how often does that happen? And still... we don't know what it is, such a bizarre mix of events.
It happens more often than you’d think; I mean, it’s still unlikely and quite rare but they’re called Lazarus taxon. I’m not sure if that applies to this thing entirely since it never really disappeared from the fossil record, but was found to still exist in modern times after fossils of it were found… so maybe?
The regular pattern reminded me of something you'd see with a sand dollar on the shore, they burrow and leave regular patterns. So I would have guessed something from the urchin family (Clypeasteroida) , but it's amazing to have such clear fossil records going back so far with little change.
Inexplicable geometric markings from across the unbridgeable gulfs of time, made by organisms native to the fuliginous abyss, still extant, yet totally unknown to modern science? Lovecraft would have loved this episode.
Do we know for sure these tubes are made by an organic creature? I know hexagons show up a lot in things like thermal geology, and if they’re found on the sea floor near vents it might be related to that?
Can probably tell by the chemical make up of the fossil, or samples from these in the ocean, there would inherently be chemical deposits from the venting.
Hexagonal lattices are a common crystal shape but typically they'd get this property from their molecular structure and it becomes less uniform as you scale up. These are uniform at large scales and made of sediment so that suggests a living creature rather than a geological phenomenon.
I used to find myself thinking "I mean, really though?" when I watched scifi. Then I hear about stuff like this and then I realize how unimaginative scifi really is compared to real life.
Writers are humans whatever inspiration we have is always connected to what we know . Being too abstract in Sci-fi can also ended up ruining it like a random brush stroke of paints that doesn't resemble anything
It's not that sci fi is unimaginative. It's more that the process of natural selection is the ultimate random number generator for species differentiation. The human brain cannot hope to compete with over 600 million years of continuity with that process .
Maybe paleodictyon lives as a biofilm on the walls of the tubes? Or maybe it's something with legs that digs and maintains the burrows like an ant? This is such a fascinating find!
all i can think of is sea ants and how wierd they might look (edit: so there is a species that is called a sea ant/lice but i was thinking more litteral sea ants)
The host said that it couldn't be dug burrows, because the corners were too sharp (4:11-4:22). Given the info in this video, which is all I know so far, I'm leaning toward paleodictyon being a glass sponge, rather than a xenophyophore. But, I wonder if it could possibly be both!? Could a xenophyophore have symbiotically combined with a glass sponge, the way algae combined with corals? Mmm, or maybe not symbiotically; hiding in the hexagonal tubes and waiting for the food to be swept in would benefit the xenophyophore in feeding and avoiding predation, but I'm not sure how the glass sponge would benefit from the arrangement. ////Bunny kisses for all!
The first thing I thought on seeing the fossil was "beehive" - and then I thought about just how common a hexagonal shape can be in certain things. Like chemistry, right? It's kind of a natural form that performs certain functions, but there's so MANY functions that can link to that arrangement - definitely a puzzler!! And fascinating that even though they found modern "new" ones, there was no one home?! That's so weird and wondrous!
Hollow hexagons occurring is no surprise, since any group of multiple things of malleable form, but equal size (like bubbles), will automatically seek to fill in as densely as possible (because gaps are weak spots, and as 'nature abhors a vacuum', natural movement will 'seek' to fill in the weaknesses in the pattern) and form hexagons. However, what makes these formations so interesting is that they are solid hexagons with hollow sides (tubes)! This means it's NOT forming from the automatic process of the settling of malleable equal size bodies, but forms theoretically UNDER a fully opaque mass (mud), yet with extreme regularity! As the diagram showed when she was talking about the vent tubes not all being the same height, those vent tubes form in the MIDDLE of single submerged tube lines, NOT at the intersections...but how did those positions end up so constantly equidistant, and spaced exactly as needed to keep from crowding any OTHER coming (or prior) tube positions? The tube height difference WOULD seem to point to the organism(s?) originating from the center point and expanding outward, but then WHY would the tubes be so perfectly spaced in relation to each other even as it expanded outward?? Logic (and normal biological patterns) would call for the arrangement to get more widely spaced the further the growth of the creature (colony?) got from the point of origin, yet in total denial of that tendency to expand through growth, the pattern remains consistent, no matter how far from the high tube 'center' of the organism (colony). And the fact that ALL tubes connect to ALL OTHER tubes in the same way, without ever breaking away on the edges... I'd never been aware of this fossil before this video (that I recall, I'm old enough that memory no longer serves so well), and I find the whole thing fascinating!
Sonja, you gotta watch CGP Grey’s hexagon video. It’s fascinating. I’d link it but TH-cam will assume I’m a bot, it’s easy to find and worth a watch. ✨
I’m confused. The only reason we found these things living today was because we found the holes they make. They use those holes to feed with. Despite that, we found no dna and nothing inside it, like it was already abandoned. But it had to have been there, since the only reason we found it was because of the holes it uses to feed with. Did I miss something or did this just make things weirder?
She mentioned that sediment only builds up in the areas they are found at a rate of 1 cm every 650 years or something like that, so these whole could be abandoned for decades or even centuries and would be nearly unchanged in appearance.
please please keep uploading on the Eons podcast! it is absolutely amazing and the content is incredible!! just finished the first podcast of “The Only Human In The La Brea Tar Pits” and i’m so amazed :)
I used to have a Y-shaped piece of fossil like that. I always just assumed it had once been part of an organism from the bottom of a long-gone body of water. It just had the look of a petrified organism.
It is not a surprise that these are nested and hexagonal in shape. Such a hexagonal shape is simply the most efficient way to approximate a round hole (or cell) while covering a comparably large area and while leaving no unused spaces between cells. Honey bees have also figured this out. Another example... When many round balls are put onto a 2-dimensional surface and then bunched together, they will ALWAYs bunch together in a hexagonal pattern, as that is the position which requires the least energy to maintain its shape.
Insects were at their largest around 300 million years ago, during the late Carboniferous and early Permian periods. This was the time of the griffinflies, giant dragonfly-like insects with wingspans of up to 28 inches. Heritage Daily The Carboniferous period lasted from about 359 to 299 million years ago. Fossils from this period show that giant dragonflies and huge cockroaches were common. The Paleozoic era, which lasted from 542 to 250 million years ago, is divided into six periods. The last two periods, the Carboniferous and the Permian, saw the development of the largest insects.
When I saw your community post about it, my first thought was it might be imprints from those scale trees you made a video about years ago. They look identical. But then I looked it up and these are found in the ocean, so it couldn't be.
Mind-blower, wow. Seems that the hexagonal formations have a maximum size, which steers me away from corals, sponges, mollusk colonies, worm colonies, bacteria and fungi. An individual organism is my best guess. Echinodermata, the starfish family have very geometric shapes and a limited size.
> Bees don't make hexagon shaped wax cells. - They make round ones. Which, because of their composition, stretches into more stable hexagon shapes. - These 500 million year old fossils may work on the same principle. But may be natural gas bubble channels doing the same thing in certain types of soil.
Kind of remind me of Rhabdammina spp. tubes. See three way junctions and tubes in micro palaeo preps quite often from quiescent environments. Also see a lot of pyrite rods from time to time of unknown origin, usually just call them burrows. Could be these. Something I’ll pose to my work colleagues.
That's pretty cool, my guess would still be some kind of sponge or coral. Then again, some kind of worm could still be possible as well, as the center worms would be 'older' and bigger than the ones on the edges, which could explain why the center tubes are slightly bigger. But it would be a weird construction for worms, as they usually don't share burrows as far as i know, unless they're clone clusters. Corals would also be a stretch, as there would have to be living tissue inside those tubes blocking the water flow, which would basically negate the 'current flow theory' use of the tubes. Sponges would seem the most likely still, or, seabees.
To be fair while sponges or a near relative could fit the bill its also possible it might not be an animal at all frankly it could even be prokaryotic since multicellularity has evolved a number of times in bacteria. Whatever it is if we define it to be a sea bee we can change the question to what is a sea bee. :P
Couldn’t it have been a colony of sea worms? The ones that kinda grow a shell and if they live and grow together, natures way of making the most of space is the hexagon. So they maybe have grown into a dense colony of worms or corals that grew together and the round tubes of each connected to a beehive structure, just like nature intended
I have actually found those before at low tide in the forgotten coast region of Florida. But I have never found an explanation as to what it is. I think if people want to figure out what it is they should start at inspiration point, Florida near the fsu marine laboratory. At low tide and walk out a little ways.
I recently watched the video on how humans lost their fur and felt that it would be interesting to discuss how other mammals likes elephants, rhinos and hippos lost theirs, despite being unrelated to reach other
@JustAnother RandomDude elephants live in hot environments like Africa and India, but mammoths lived in the colder parts of North American and parts of Siberia. So the elephants lost their fur because they didn't need it, while the mammoths kept it because they needed it.
I'm thinking of an animal that feeds a lot like a woodpecker. With the top layer of the sediment being less soluble than its underlying layer, as soon as an opening is made along with a counter shaft the sub strata of sediment dissolves and is carried away resulting in the hexagonal concavities.
I wonder if this is a hatchery of sorts... Whatever it is, lays them in this order, then they hatch and abandon the structure. It would explain why with so many modern versions of these structures are abandoned by the time we find them.
I have a question about fossils in the ocean -- are there fossils down there? Are there ways of finding them without disturbing the ecosystem? What are the challenges of finding them in the ocean?
I imagine its because its difficult to mine/explore underwater. Underwater jobs are some of the most dangerous on earth as well There are many dangers with people diving... we have robots that can explore and collect but are there any that also dig underwater? I have no idea
drilling rock cores for (micro) and invertebrate fossils? i would image and maybe someone can help us out here, that most of the oceanic crust fossils would eventually be recycled at subduction zones after a while though? but im curious to know more about this too!
I'm sure there are fossils in the ocean floor, or even maybe under your feet right now, but the tricky part is getting to them. What land is under water changes all the time, but very old rocks that haven't been warped by pressure and heat could potentially hold fossils. Typically the places we find fossils though are in deserts and on mountains because the rocks are mostly bare and therefore expose their fossils over time.
People drill the ocean floor for sediment cores regularly. However its mostly for finding microfossils (plankton, pollen, etc.) for climatological purposes rather than finding anything particulalry big. Also consider that the youngest oceanic crust (in the eastern mediterrannean) is only 200 Mya old due to subduction.
I think there are types of mold/spores that form these types of honeycomb shapes. I recall seeing some time-lapse video of a variety of these organisms where they appear to pulse and undulate. If a colony of them lived for a long enough time, perhaps they could leave fossil patterns like these behind. Edit: probably not in this case. Didn’t know these fossils were found deep underwater. It would be nigh impossible for a fungus to grow and maintain its shape in that environment. It would likely be torn apart by ocean currents.
I think something interesting I heard about bees is they don’t make hexagons. They make lots of circular tubes and hexagons just happen to be the most efficient shape of sticking all the tubes together
When I think of the consistency of Paleodictyon I think of the Earth's frequency being the constant and somehow the vibrations creating the pattern and it solidifying over time.
Saturn's pole has a pentagonal ring caused by a double vortex. Oddly, we know what causes that, but not the ocean floor hexagons. Jupiter has a hexagonal pole vortex. It's remarkable such huge shapes exist in nature. And how small these shapes get too, atomic scale. This one is a puzzler. Hopefully we don't drive it to extinction before we figure out what caused these hexagons
Alright I'm kind of annoyed by this video. You're looking for a sessile invertebrate, grows in fractal patterns, leave no trace of soft flesh, and have been around for millions of years... Why weren't corals mentioned?! Seriously. There's even a biological order called Hexacorallia. You know, HEXA (6)... C'mon folks.
I just watched this video and barely got through a couple of minutes and was thinking the same thing some form of coral or sponge. After watching more it seems they have an idea of what it could be.
Do you know I was even thinking that maybe shrimp or something similar could have caused it. Bees make this type of pattern when forming their hives in the form of honeycombs and there is a species of shrimp that live in a colony and have a the equivalent to a queen that live in certain sponges. Perhaps a creature similar to some type of shrimp or even a barnacle make these structures. After all barnacles do have an odd shape to their bodies when they grow and the material that they use to make is there a heart and shell casings is about as tough as concrete perhaps some shrimp like relative was able to make a similar structure live in a colony and feed similarly to a barnacle but after so much time their bodies rotted and decayed and left only their tough structures to be found. Something similar has occurred when it came to squid and octopus their bodies are mostly soft and the only things that are left behind is the heart structure in their mantle similar to cuttlebone. Other than that it had been very difficult for them to find any evidence of their soft bodies. They have found the shells of creatures similar to Nautilus however.
This formation is found in sand particles when they’re on a plate connected to a tone generator with an extremely high frequency perhaps for long periods of time with a bottom vibration from earth could explain it
Those shapes form perfectly when the frequencies of the concert pentatonic scale are hit . All the shapes formed are carved in stone in Rosslyn Chapel , Edinburgh - of Davinci Code fame . It's also how megaton stones were moved to build megaliths before we had ropes or metal tools .
My Sister Gave Me Something Like That. She Said She Found It Near Rock Home Garden, In Illinois. The One I Have Looks Better Than Any You Showed. Different, Kinda More Tan. One Side Has Geometric Shapes. The Other Side Looks Like Kind of Tubes. It is My Favorite Rock. I Wish I Had A Camera So I Could Show You How Cool it Is. I Saw Your Picture, And Thought I Had Coral. I Am Glad, It Is Much More.
Fractal means self-similar across scales, so if you zoom in or out you see a similar or the same pattern. That's just some tiled hexagons, not a fractal.
Fractals need not be self-similar at all, except in the most abstract sense. For instance, a rough coastline is a fractal insofar as it would display more-or-less equivalent roughness at any length-scale.
0:02 🙋🏻♂️ my guess Wasps 1 st bees lived underground In the roots of trees Something was living in spite of spiders well from them 😂 Webs were not just to catch water ya know 0:02
So with no organic remains associated with the fossils, and no one home in the actual burrows on the sea floor (so far) are we sure this isnt some gas (or fluid) escape structure, which would be why it's so common in turbidites and near hydrothermal vents?
I looked at this and thought to myself, that's some kind of formation coral would make. What else lives under the ocean, and makes extremely similar yet complex tubes? Could this be the leftover tubing sections from some kind of 500 million year old coral that has long since died out?
The modern "holes" with a similar pattern were found in the mid-Atlantic ridge, that's about 4.000 m deep. Much too deep for coral, even a very slow-growing one. I’m rather thinking a multiple organism full of holes, like a sponge maybe?
I bet it's eggs laid under a layer of sand, the dots on top are from them hatching and climbing out. It's why when they find them they are always empty. Of course I have no real idea but, maybe?
@@luckyblockyoshi Hollow because what use to be there is no longer there, the tubes could be where they climbed out to the surface,. And yes, some egg pods in nature are indeed hexagonal, it wouldn't be the first time that shape has appeared in nature.
What a surprisingly thrilling fossil! The jump from "we don't know what this is" to "oh, it looks like it's still alive today" to "but....we still can't figure out what it is..." our world is just so endlessly mysterious and exciting!
Something I think is interesting is that it could be made from frequency given off from earth. At the bottom of the ocean we see this perfect hexagonal pattern formed near the surface and requires not much weight to be on to so it can form. At the surface land level bees form perfect hexagonal designs and studies on how bees inform other members of the hive where flowers are is done through a "dance" where they state that clockwise and counterclockwise rotation plus the time taken to do this give direction but, they also shake during this which isn't mentioned as useful even though to me bees would navigate using 3 points since they fly. Finally perfect snowflakes also form symmetrical hexagonal patterns as they form in the atmosphere.
@@CryAnalog Basalt erodes in hexagonal columns as well (think "Devil's Tower" & Giant's Causeway). Then there's the hugest hexagon in the solar system on the north pole of Saturn! What's up with nature settling into hexagons?
Fish egg beds.
Squishy spheres aligned together will make that pattern. Think on it.
You're welcome,
- Not my real name, attribute "in honor of Da Vinci"
Hell, people can't even accept the fact transgender people are born. It amazes me how ignorant most people are and how truly little we know even about the human race.
@@donivanpotter2762 ... I could interpret that a few ways... the interpretation most likely what you mean doesn't fair well for you.
Even amongst fossilized mysteries, hexagons are the bestagons.
Most underrated comment
They're better than all the restagons
Y'all are shapist! ;D
needs more likes!!
Average CGP Grey Enjoyer
Hexagonal stacking is actually the most physically efficient pattern. If you put a bunch of round bubbles together, they will actually make this pattern.
I've seen that, always found it cool that it defaulted to hexagons.
PEOPLE?
WHAT SHAPE IS THE BESTAGON
There's a hexagon cloud at the poles of the Saturn.
honey combs
@@TheTuxedoCreeper Yes that is there and completely expected based on how thermal convection works.
You can see the same effect in some cloud formations from a passenger jet looking down.
I'm swiss and I've found a rock with this honeycomb pattern while hicking in the alps. I thought it was a piece of concrete from a bunker or something like that. I never thought it was a fossil.
it is most likely ancient building.
@@WeWereOnline Actually, unless it was somewhere where buildings were or had been, it most likely wasn't. And given that people hiking in the Alps are statistically far more likely to be in areas where there aren't buildings in their locale, then it's also more likely not to be from a building.
@@aphanez have you ever considered a cataclysm?
@@WeWereOnline have you ever considered that you are stupid?
@@WeWereOnline have you ever considered not bullshitting on the internet
Only explanation is…intergalactic bees coming to Earth to turn the planet into a giant honey pot
Most likely explanation indeed. I was thinking the same
I mean any other conclusion would just be ridiculous
Brand new sentence right here folks step right up
It's bee people 100%
Lava bees
One of the stranger episodes. The fact there is modern remains and zero confirmed source organism... amazing.
They know the source they just havent seen the organism becaus its so far down under the mud at rhe bottom of the sea. But they know it creates the pattern. They just havent seen it out from under the mud.
It’s obviously a 500 million year old tire track.
So just like human beings
One of my favorite fossils, because ot literally represents what's fascinating about paleontolgy: it's like being a detective of the natural science, putting together the little clues you have to solve mysteries sometimes as old as life itself.
Scientists: "What are you?"
Paleodictyon: ...⬡⬡⬡⬡⬡⬡...
Scientists: "That's no answer."
Paleodictyon: ..........
Maybe they are related to bees
reminded me of the quote: "Starfleet was founded to seek out new life - well, there it sits! ...waiting."
@@wallylasd Or they are related to things that have realized that hexagons are one of only three geometrical figures with which you can tile an even surface completely. :)
(The other two being squares and triangles.)
@@PondScummer To be fair going far enough back they should be related to bees, palm trees and fungi etc. As far as we know everything traces back to a common ancestor but yeah there is no way this is an insect arthropod... heck in all likelihood it probably isn't an animal at all since multicellularity doesn't appear to be hard to evolve if a suitable evolutionary driver supports it.
Among the first fossils I found as a child. I followed a passion to become a geologist, now retired. Thank You for a great video!
I love that story 👍
What is the most amazing fossil you found?
That's hilarious, every single time I'm nerding out about how little we know about the ocean I also need to include a little 'but not megalodon' because everybody's so hell bent on insisting it might still be out there
Every time I talk to my grandmother about extinct animals I preface with "it is no longer alive" and she still tries to say it could still be out there.
Who's to say it isn't Megalodon creating these patterns?
@@boyinblue. I mean technically she has a point there have been multiple examples of species thought to be extinct, just for scientist to find the animals years sometimes decades later.
@@cwillis92 She is one of the Bigfoot crazed people, she keeps telling me that she thinks mammoths are in the artic causing earthquakes. I'm pretty sure her points are just coming from those paranormal shows.
@@boyinblue. aww yea that's a bit much. It's always crazy how even the most logical ideas can still lead us to some of the most illogical ideas in other areas of life lol
This is gonna sound crazy but I have been thinking about this for a long time. There are other hexagons in nature - think Devil's Causeway and honeycomb. Here's the thing, if circles are packed touching each other and they expand, they turn into hexagons. There is an easy experiment you can try at home. Get a tube of refrigerator biscuits - not homemade, they have to be perfect circles - put them in a baking pan where they just touch. Bake them and when you take out the pan - hexagonal biscuits. My theory is that you end up with hexagons in nature because there was something there that was originally round - a round organism, a tube, a drop of water, an air bubble. Then they either expand or contract - Devil's Causeway - and voila hexagons. Is it possible that some of this stuff is merely geometry at work in nature.
You just gave me an idea. If biscuits were cut into hexagons instead of circles, there wouldnt be waste dough between the biscuits when they are cut out.
You could have written something a lot more crazy than that. Perhaps there's evidence out there that the source of the fossils is organic, but I wonder if it's not even produced by an organism, but by crystallization of some sort. It would be a bit more surprising if the modern things on the sea floor weren't made by an organism, though.
@@alexanderlapp5048 is this the start of a cookie revolution??!
And many places with basaltic columns. You can find them in multiple places in the US; including the Devil’s Tower which is composed of such basaltic columns. I have been a number of places where they can be found on the side of the road where a highway has been cut right through them.
Cookie theory is true, I've baked many
It's the crazy "We have no idea" stuff that makes my ears perk up. I loved the feeling when we found the first planet(s). It is a life experience to go from "We don't know" to "We found an answer" .. Great job as always Kelli (and yes, I know I probably spelled that wrong).
You probably meant exoplanets, haha, or, you're just _reeeaaallly_ old.
@@Games_and_Music correct.. Exo
These videos have end credits with the names of all the people who worked on them if you're curious. They list "Kallie Moore" as one of the hosts, that must be her [seems they don't change the credits per episode to reflect who the current host was]
Lmao someone just outed themselves as a vampire I see
@@67comet The boy band? Oh no I've been listening too many Kpop songs lately
I found an ancient ocean basin above my house in the hills , I found many fossils and won an award for them at high school. I also found many hexagon fossils as well. I never knew what caused them…until now
you still dont know. not for sure, at least
Being a protist doesn't mean it's necessarily related to algae and amoebas. it's just the box we throw everything into when it's not an animal, plant. fungus, bacteria, or archaea.
I'm an antitist
@@tsmspace you mean antitheist?
@@BackYardScience2000 no, a non-protist xD
@@BackYardScience2000 well, not a protist anyway
Ah, seaweed. The plantiest non-plant to ever plant.
"Who knows what the next dive will bring us? Not Megalodon, that's for sure."
Crushing dreams with facts and logic.
Eh, we might discover another giant fish, or another species of giant squid. You never know.
Honestly, we’re more likely to find a fish sized mosasaur species than megalodon
She is brutal.
did you grow up? or do you still seek to communicate with strangers with tropes and idioms?
It’s actually not too unbelievable when you think of the geometric shapes that appear in molecules (such as carbon rings), or especially the hexagonal shape of honeycomb. Now I’m just a curious as to what made this!
honeycomb is right. contrary to popular opinion, bees do not make honeycomb structures; they make round structures which, when they crowd in on each other, become hexagonal.. i wonder if a similar process is at work here.
o think it has something to do with the stability of the angles inside, although, when you study carbon rings deeper, you learn that they arent exact hexagons, they have boat and hat arrengements, cause molecules are 3D
@@pbajnow Saturn's pole has a pentagonal ring caused by a double vortex. Oddly, we know what causes that, but not the ocean floor hexagons. Jupiter has a hexagonal pole vortex. It's remarkable such huge shapes exist in nature. And how small these shapes get too, atomic scale.
This one is a puzzler. Hopefully we don't drive it to extinction before we figure out what caused these hexagons
Because hexagon is the bestagon
@@brentweissert6524 I’ve never heard this, more research is needed. ADHD dive into bees incoming lol
These are likely formed like honeycomb. They are not formed in a hexagonal shape. They are circles placed next to each other and the tension creates the hexagon
I'ma need u nerds to gimme all your money
I found paleodyction in core CT scans. Pyrite formed in the fossil which highlighted highlighted it in CT. As I was viewing the scans, I saw the flashes of hexagonal patterns with depth. It was thrilling.
I don't suppose you have any images or footage of that? Because if you do, and you're at liberty to share them, I imagine that'd look super interesting! And who knows, it might give someone more educated than I some ideas they hadn't thought of yet ;)
Big deal.
Did you catch it and eat it? If so what does paleodycteon taste like?
It's the fabric of space.
@@benvinar2876 The 'fabric of space isn't Spandex?
I've found similar specimens in Utah near an extinct hot spring/ volcanic dome. The rocks are travertine calcite, and contain traces of petrified and/or mummiffied plant materials. The area was notably under water during deposition and would have been a geothermal vent where the specimens were found.
Maybe they are extremophiles, flourishing inside volcanic vents and expanding out to the surrounding sea floor at times when the water is heated during periods of volcanic activity. When the water cools, or maybe when some vented material dissipates, they retreat back into the vents or die off.
Maybe when a hot spring or vent brings up certain sulfur compounds or petroleum, this creature colonizes the area, scavenging the chemicals as its food source. It could even be a familiar organism that changes its behavior to build the hexagon structures only in certain scenarios to take advantage when an underwater eruption provides its favorite food. Or maybe it builds and uses the structures as a survival tactic only when food is particularly scarce or the environment is hostile. Maybe when exposed to rising levels of toxic gases, it builds the hexagons as a filtered environment to live in until a return to more livable conditions.
@@_Painted I've thought maybe they are a crustacean that built hives similar to a wasp/muddobber that would have, as you said, sought food sources around geothermal vents. Or perhaps even some kind of organized microbial colonies or some kind of coral-like organism. Hard to say, but I tend to believe it is biological in origin.
I like my giant bee hypothesis. 😆
There 3d cubes, the nature of space
This story of elusive sub-surface organisms reminds me of my experiences as a kid on the beaches of Georgia and its neighboring states: These beaches had common things that would squirt water (actually usually a mixture of water and sand) up after a wave would retract . . . and no matter how hard I tried I could never find the responsible organism. I also noticed that the beaches had plenty of tiny rapidly burrowing clams (Donax variabilis?), which would be plausible candidates for a squirting organism, but these didn't seem to do that.
Those are hermit crabs. If you dig deep and quick enough you can catch them.
I'm in SC, and love the beaches.
Thats cuz they dig once you start to
All PBS Eons videos are pretty good, but for this one, the sound design really shines. The music is so fitting for the subject matter. Great job to the sound editor!
I was just thinking how unneeded the music is.
I have a few fossils that have this honeycomb pattern. there are relatively common where I live in southern Indiana. I put them in vinegar overnight and it really exposes the individual cells and remnants of what was inside them. Great video 🙂👍
Edit: Just to be clear, the fossils I’m referring to are not fossils of the same creature featured in this vid, it just has the same honeycomb pattern ✌️🙂
Ikr, I have a similar. I'm in Iowa. I assumed someone, just not me, knew what it was
Got any Twitter where we can see pictures of these bathed in vinegar?
Same here on the shores of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin!
@@PerfectionHunter for some reason I can’t say goo gull in the comments or it gets erased. This will be the third time I’ve tried to reply to you. Search the G word for “fossils in vinegar” or something similar. It’s commonly used to clean and/or expose fossils
Fellow Hoosier here, but more north. Didnt know we had common bestagon fossils hanging around.
I remember watching an IMAX movie about an expedition to find these guys probably 15 years ago, but I could never remember the name "paleodictyon" and I was beginning to think the entire thing was a dream, until just now with this vid.
YES. I saw that film, but I could never remember the name! I even tried to Google it once, but I couldn't find it!
@@patlee8539 It's called Volcanoes of the Deep Sea, I've had a blu ray copy of it for years
Very cool, would like to see more content on the more ambiguous stuff like this
See their podcast!
Pretty sure they have an episode about the Tully Monster
I found a stone with the honeycomb pattern on my farm in Alabama. I believe the rocks there were from an ancient mud flat that may had hosted sea life and or simply foamed with bubbles that became stone. A lot of conglomerate there so it developed around different geological events.
I found a couple interesting specimens near Bismarck, ND, where there was once a large inland ocean. I thought they were honeycombs, but seeing as how they were found with a variety of other marine fossils, it must be Paleodictyon! One of the ones I found is even agatized!
There 3d cubes , the nature of space
Not necessarily. Look up images of Petoskey stones and fossilized Hexagonaria corals.
I love how in science, "we don't know yet" is just as interesting as an actual answer, sometimes even more.
I like it when there are multiple competing theories for what it is and all of them are equally possible until further evidence is found.
@@WanderTheNomad *appear equally possible
The rules, while including things like observer effects, are not themselves subject to observation effects. The right answer was right the whole time, it only appeared to be as likely as the other wrong answers. The difference is subtle, but important.
@@demonzabrak I didn't think I would ever say this, but isn't that just semantics?
@@WanderTheNomad in a surprising plot twist, semantics are important. It’s literally how any of us can convey information reliably. (Yes. It is 100% semantics. Feel free to ignore the rest)
That said, I’ll try and make more sense. The original phrasing you used implies that the rules of physics become concrete and definite when observed, which is something you should avoid implying about a rule set that includes literal changes based on if something is observed or not. Double slit experiment, electron uncertainty, quantum states changing between entangled particles, things of that nature.
It muddies the waters a bit, and I kinda feel like a lot of modern problems could be significantly mitigated if we were all sorta just better at communicating. So I make a lot of semantic arguments and meta arguments about other peoples arguments to people on TH-cam.
It’s basically trolling, but in a way that hopefully makes people better at communicating.
@@demonzabrak If your goal is improving people's communication skills, this seems like quite the roundabout way to do it.
That allergy test comparison was so specific but I'm shocked at how accurate that is. Eons sure does know their audience 😂
"...it's a living I guess"
Lolz, still better than a 9-5 office job 😂😂😂
I was about to comment something like: We will never know what could possibly have made such strange fossils. Then a miracle happens, the strange animal actually is still alive among us (Edit: we might have to improve our mining craft in order to excavate these seemingly fallen guys out of their sub-aquatic forts at night), how often does that happen? And still... we don't know what it is, such a bizarre mix of events.
It happens more often than you’d think; I mean, it’s still unlikely and quite rare but they’re called Lazarus taxon. I’m not sure if that applies to this thing entirely since it never really disappeared from the fossil record, but was found to still exist in modern times after fossils of it were found… so maybe?
English, please.
@@JohnVKaravitis Sorry, not first language.
@@diegog1853 Your english is perfectly fine. Perhaps John was referring to some of the scientific terminology in Pigeon Lord's comment?
Amogus
The regular pattern reminded me of something you'd see with a sand dollar on the shore, they burrow and leave regular patterns. So I would have guessed something from the urchin family (Clypeasteroida) , but it's amazing to have such clear fossil records going back so far with little change.
This is a fossil I've *never* heard of before now. Fascinating!
Volcanoes of the Deep Sea (2003) covers this topic! It has always been one of my favorite films
Inexplicable geometric markings from across the unbridgeable gulfs of time, made by organisms native to the fuliginous abyss, still extant, yet totally unknown to modern science?
Lovecraft would have loved this episode.
Indeed he would have.
@@Ragnarra Perhaps he wrote it...😐
Do we know for sure these tubes are made by an organic creature? I know hexagons show up a lot in things like thermal geology, and if they’re found on the sea floor near vents it might be related to that?
I feel like the people working on this have probably either ruled that out or they don't have enough info to do that yet.
Can probably tell by the chemical make up of the fossil, or samples from these in the ocean, there would inherently be chemical deposits from the venting.
Hexagonal lattices are a common crystal shape but typically they'd get this property from their molecular structure and it becomes less uniform as you scale up. These are uniform at large scales and made of sediment so that suggests a living creature rather than a geological phenomenon.
I used to find myself thinking "I mean, really though?" when I watched scifi. Then I hear about stuff like this and then I realize how unimaginative scifi really is compared to real life.
Writers are humans whatever inspiration we have is always connected to what we know . Being too abstract in Sci-fi can also ended up ruining it like a random brush stroke of paints that doesn't resemble anything
It's not that sci fi is unimaginative.
It's more that the process of natural selection is the ultimate random number generator for species differentiation.
The human brain cannot hope to compete with over 600 million years of continuity with that process .
Truth is stranger than fiction.
8:12 "As if perhaps they were doing some sort of hydroponics things to farm their poop bacteria"
Man what a sentence that was
Maybe paleodictyon lives as a biofilm on the walls of the tubes? Or maybe it's something with legs that digs and maintains the burrows like an ant? This is such a fascinating find!
all i can think of is sea ants and how wierd they might look
(edit: so there is a species that is called a sea ant/lice but i was thinking more litteral sea ants)
Hmmm could a biofilm create tubes? That would be scary
The host said that it couldn't be dug burrows, because the corners were too sharp (4:11-4:22). Given the info in this video, which is all I know so far, I'm leaning toward paleodictyon being a glass sponge, rather than a xenophyophore. But, I wonder if it could possibly be both!?
Could a xenophyophore have symbiotically combined with a glass sponge, the way algae combined with corals? Mmm, or maybe not symbiotically; hiding in the hexagonal tubes and waiting for the food to be swept in would benefit the xenophyophore in feeding and avoiding predation, but I'm not sure how the glass sponge would benefit from the arrangement. ////Bunny kisses for all!
As CGP grey once said:
Hexagons are the bestagons
Really heartening to see how quickly this channel has grown.
The study site is so extreme it’s like a mars mission.
The first thing I thought on seeing the fossil was "beehive" - and then I thought about just how common a hexagonal shape can be in certain things. Like chemistry, right? It's kind of a natural form that performs certain functions, but there's so MANY functions that can link to that arrangement - definitely a puzzler!! And fascinating that even though they found modern "new" ones, there was no one home?! That's so weird and wondrous!
beehive was my first thought as well! but if it's known from 500 million years ago from deep sea sediments, I don't think it's a beehive :P
check out the video "hexagons are the bestagons" by CGP Grey!
@@audreydeatherage2131 Yeah! That's a great one!
Hollow hexagons occurring is no surprise, since any group of multiple things of malleable form, but equal size (like bubbles), will automatically seek to fill in as densely as possible (because gaps are weak spots, and as 'nature abhors a vacuum', natural movement will 'seek' to fill in the weaknesses in the pattern) and form hexagons. However, what makes these formations so interesting is that they are solid hexagons with hollow sides (tubes)! This means it's NOT forming from the automatic process of the settling of malleable equal size bodies, but forms theoretically UNDER a fully opaque mass (mud), yet with extreme regularity!
As the diagram showed when she was talking about the vent tubes not all being the same height, those vent tubes form in the MIDDLE of single submerged tube lines, NOT at the intersections...but how did those positions end up so constantly equidistant, and spaced exactly as needed to keep from crowding any OTHER coming (or prior) tube positions? The tube height difference WOULD seem to point to the organism(s?) originating from the center point and expanding outward, but then WHY would the tubes be so perfectly spaced in relation to each other even as it expanded outward?? Logic (and normal biological patterns) would call for the arrangement to get more widely spaced the further the growth of the creature (colony?) got from the point of origin, yet in total denial of that tendency to expand through growth, the pattern remains consistent, no matter how far from the high tube 'center' of the organism (colony). And the fact that ALL tubes connect to ALL OTHER tubes in the same way, without ever breaking away on the edges...
I'd never been aware of this fossil before this video (that I recall, I'm old enough that memory no longer serves so well), and I find the whole thing fascinating!
Sonja, you gotta watch CGP Grey’s hexagon video. It’s fascinating. I’d link it but TH-cam will assume I’m a bot, it’s easy to find and worth a watch. ✨
I did not know BF Goodrich had those kinds of threads back in the day.
I’m confused.
The only reason we found these things living today was because we found the holes they make. They use those holes to feed with. Despite that, we found no dna and nothing inside it, like it was already abandoned. But it had to have been there, since the only reason we found it was because of the holes it uses to feed with. Did I miss something or did this just make things weirder?
We shot a squirt gun at it.
She mentioned that sediment only builds up in the areas they are found at a rate of 1 cm every 650 years or something like that, so these whole could be abandoned for decades or even centuries and would be nearly unchanged in appearance.
@@BobbyHill26 oooo yah that makes sense.
@@BobbyHill26 I really hope whatever made these shapes hasn't gone extinct in that time
@@limiv5272 well the bottom of the ocean is pretty much untouched by humans thankfully so whatever it is it has a better chance down there.
please please keep uploading on the Eons podcast! it is absolutely amazing and the content is incredible!! just finished the first podcast of “The Only Human In The La Brea Tar Pits” and i’m so amazed :)
5:15 Protist is more or less a junk drawer. They can be as related to each other as plants are to animals.
"Invertebrate of uncertain identity" reminds me of "rodents of unusual size."
I'm trypophobic but I still managed to watch this whole episode for the sake of science
Same 😂😅
I have trypophobia as well
That’s awesome! You did your own exposure therapy 😊 (Side note: I am sincere, I know tone can read obscure at times.)
It was kind of hard for me, i had to just listen at some points
Lol, that “fad” was a few years ago. You can all drop the quirky act now. We get it, you’re different.
"Squirt guns for science"
Fun fact: the Super Soaker was invented by a literal rocket scientist.
I used to have a Y-shaped piece of fossil like that. I always just assumed it had once been part of an organism from the bottom of a long-gone body of water. It just had the look of a petrified organism.
Occam's razor: Van's wearing time travelers.
The only thing we know for sure is, hexagons are bestagons.
At the beginning I thought "seems obvious to me that it's the cells of a nest for larvae or eggs" and I still think that.
It is not a surprise that these are nested and hexagonal in shape. Such a hexagonal shape is simply the most efficient way to approximate a round hole (or cell) while covering a comparably large area and while leaving no unused spaces between cells. Honey bees have also figured this out. Another example... When many round balls are put onto a 2-dimensional surface and then bunched together, they will ALWAYs bunch together in a hexagonal pattern, as that is the position which requires the least energy to maintain its shape.
Insects were at their largest around 300 million years ago, during the late Carboniferous and early Permian periods. This was the time of the griffinflies, giant dragonfly-like insects with wingspans of up to 28 inches.
Heritage Daily
The Carboniferous period lasted from about 359 to 299 million years ago. Fossils from this period show that giant dragonflies and huge cockroaches were common.
The Paleozoic era, which lasted from 542 to 250 million years ago, is divided into six periods. The last two periods, the Carboniferous and the Permian, saw the development of the largest insects.
When I saw your community post about it, my first thought was it might be imprints from those scale trees you made a video about years ago. They look identical. But then I looked it up and these are found in the ocean, so it couldn't be.
I love how every few episodes either PBS Eons or SciShow reminds us that Megalodon hasn't survived.
"No guys, Megalodon definitely _is_ extinct."
there a lot of idiots in florida that need to be reminded of that daily 😂
Mind-blower, wow. Seems that the hexagonal formations have a maximum size, which steers me away from corals, sponges, mollusk colonies, worm colonies, bacteria and fungi. An individual organism is my best guess. Echinodermata, the starfish family have very geometric shapes and a limited size.
> Bees don't make hexagon shaped wax cells.
- They make round ones. Which, because of their composition, stretches into more stable hexagon shapes.
- These 500 million year old fossils may work on the same principle. But may be natural gas bubble channels doing the same thing in certain types of soil.
Hexagons are the bestagons. Nature knows what's up ✨
Obviously, they are hangars for ancient mini robots.
You know, I once found a bucket in the sea taken over by a web of coral in hexagon shape while scuba diving.
It's left over from a fossilized fungal colony formation.
Oh my, I have this fossil. I was always sure it's just a part of some building, never sure what to think about it
05:05 Xenophyophore might be my new favourite animal. I heart the deep sea.
Nature is so amazing. She always reminds us of how little we know about her, and then entices us to learn more.
That kind of digestive adaptation would be a useful trait to engineer .
Kind of remind me of Rhabdammina spp. tubes. See three way junctions and tubes in micro palaeo preps quite often from quiescent environments. Also see a lot of pyrite rods from time to time of unknown origin, usually just call them burrows. Could be these. Something I’ll pose to my work colleagues.
Ah yes, the honeycomb shape. Still feels weird that nature makes a lot of them in a lot of places
That's pretty cool, my guess would still be some kind of sponge or coral.
Then again, some kind of worm could still be possible as well, as the center worms would be 'older' and bigger than the ones on the edges, which could explain why the center tubes are slightly bigger.
But it would be a weird construction for worms, as they usually don't share burrows as far as i know, unless they're clone clusters.
Corals would also be a stretch, as there would have to be living tissue inside those tubes blocking the water flow, which would basically negate the 'current flow theory' use of the tubes.
Sponges would seem the most likely still, or, seabees.
Seabees
To be fair while sponges or a near relative could fit the bill its also possible it might not be an animal at all frankly it could even be prokaryotic since multicellularity has evolved a number of times in bacteria.
Whatever it is if we define it to be a sea bee we can change the question to what is a sea bee. :P
Couldn’t it have been a colony of sea worms? The ones that kinda grow a shell and if they live and grow together, natures way of making the most of space is the hexagon. So they maybe have grown into a dense colony of worms or corals that grew together and the round tubes of each connected to a beehive structure, just like nature intended
I have actually found those before at low tide in the forgotten coast region of Florida. But I have never found an explanation as to what it is. I think if people want to figure out what it is they should start at inspiration point, Florida near the fsu marine laboratory. At low tide and walk out a little ways.
What about sea-bees? Underwater honeycomb - why not?
I recently watched the video on how humans lost their fur and felt that it would be interesting to discuss how other mammals likes elephants, rhinos and hippos lost theirs, despite being unrelated to reach other
They're too big and live in hot environments, so fur that traps all their body heat would be detrimental.
@@zddxddyddw and yet a mammoth had fur rotfl. He have found frozen remains of them bud. But do do do go on 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
@JustAnother RandomDude elephants live in hot environments like Africa and India, but mammoths lived in the colder parts of North American and parts of Siberia. So the elephants lost their fur because they didn't need it, while the mammoths kept it because they needed it.
I'm thinking of an animal that feeds a lot like a woodpecker. With the top layer of the sediment being less soluble than its underlying layer, as soon as an opening is made along with a counter shaft the sub strata of sediment dissolves and is carried away resulting in the hexagonal concavities.
Been waiting for the clip they actually used the jet to spray the sediments reveiling the pattern 🥺 Nevertheless, nice video! Very informative 👍🏽
I wonder if this is a hatchery of sorts... Whatever it is, lays them in this order, then they hatch and abandon the structure. It would explain why with so many modern versions of these structures are abandoned by the time we find them.
I have a question about fossils in the ocean -- are there fossils down there? Are there ways of finding them without disturbing the ecosystem? What are the challenges of finding them in the ocean?
I imagine its because its difficult to mine/explore underwater. Underwater jobs are some of the most dangerous on earth as well
There are many dangers with people diving... we have robots that can explore and collect but are there any that also dig underwater? I have no idea
drilling rock cores for (micro) and invertebrate fossils? i would image and maybe someone can help us out here, that most of the oceanic crust fossils would eventually be recycled at subduction zones after a while though? but im curious to know more about this too!
I'm sure there are fossils in the ocean floor, or even maybe under your feet right now, but the tricky part is getting to them. What land is under water changes all the time, but very old rocks that haven't been warped by pressure and heat could potentially hold fossils. Typically the places we find fossils though are in deserts and on mountains because the rocks are mostly bare and therefore expose their fossils over time.
People drill the ocean floor for sediment cores regularly. However its mostly for finding microfossils (plankton, pollen, etc.) for climatological purposes rather than finding anything particulalry big.
Also consider that the youngest oceanic crust (in the eastern mediterrannean) is only 200 Mya old due to subduction.
Bees are central to pollination of many plants, evolved on Earth. It stands to reason, Bees!
Bees did not exist 500 million years ago
I think there are types of mold/spores that form these types of honeycomb shapes. I recall seeing some time-lapse video of a variety of these organisms where they appear to pulse and undulate. If a colony of them lived for a long enough time, perhaps they could leave fossil patterns like these behind.
Edit: probably not in this case. Didn’t know these fossils were found deep underwater. It would be nigh impossible for a fungus to grow and maintain its shape in that environment. It would likely be torn apart by ocean currents.
This is fossilized coral
I believe you are talking about slime mold. Pretty neat how slime mold can move with a brain or even neurons
I'm getting excellent Eons: Mysteries of Deep Time vibes from this episode, but with fun visuals. Love this, hoping to see more videos of this sort!
I think something interesting I heard about bees is they don’t make hexagons. They make lots of circular tubes and hexagons just happen to be the most efficient shape of sticking all the tubes together
When I think of the consistency of Paleodictyon I think of the Earth's frequency being the constant and somehow the vibrations creating the pattern and it solidifying over time.
Please make a video about how the divisions of organisms (domains, kingdoms, orders, etc.) evolved over time!
Saturn's pole has a pentagonal ring caused by a double vortex. Oddly, we know what causes that, but not the ocean floor hexagons. Jupiter has a hexagonal pole vortex. It's remarkable such huge shapes exist in nature. And how small these shapes get too, atomic scale.
This one is a puzzler. Hopefully we don't drive it to extinction before we figure out what caused these hexagons
any circle that is pushed against from all sides more or less evenly will form into a hexagon
Alright I'm kind of annoyed by this video. You're looking for a sessile invertebrate, grows in fractal patterns, leave no trace of soft flesh, and have been around for millions of years... Why weren't corals mentioned?! Seriously. There's even a biological order called Hexacorallia. You know, HEXA (6)... C'mon folks.
That's what l was wondering.
I just watched this video and barely got through a couple of minutes and was thinking the same thing some form of coral or sponge. After watching more it seems they have an idea of what it could be.
Perhaps it may even be a tunicate. Or an ancient colony of barnacles or tube worms such as those near volcanic vents.
Do you know I was even thinking that maybe shrimp or something similar could have caused it. Bees make this type of pattern when forming their hives in the form of honeycombs and there is a species of shrimp that live in a colony and have a the equivalent to a queen that live in certain sponges. Perhaps a creature similar to some type of shrimp or even a barnacle make these structures. After all barnacles do have an odd shape to their bodies when they grow and the material that they use to make is there a heart and shell casings is about as tough as concrete perhaps some shrimp like relative was able to make a similar structure live in a colony and feed similarly to a barnacle but after so much time their bodies rotted and decayed and left only their tough structures to be found. Something similar has occurred when it came to squid and octopus their bodies are mostly soft and the only things that are left behind is the heart structure in their mantle similar to cuttlebone. Other than that it had been very difficult for them to find any evidence of their soft bodies. They have found the shells of creatures similar to Nautilus however.
Ditto.
this is by far the most interesting I've ever heard of in paleontology or biology, looks so surreal and other-wordly
Best Science presentation in years; give the host and writer a raise.
Really? I was just thinking this was really interesting despite the terrible presentation.
This formation is found in sand particles when they’re on a plate connected to a tone generator with an extremely high frequency perhaps for long periods of time with a bottom vibration from earth could explain it
Those shapes form perfectly when the frequencies of the concert pentatonic scale are hit . All the shapes formed are carved in stone in Rosslyn Chapel , Edinburgh - of Davinci Code fame .
It's also how megaton stones were moved to build megaliths before we had ropes or metal tools .
the glass shell is really cool! can you do a vid focused on alternatives to carbon and calcium for animals?
My Sister Gave Me Something Like That. She Said She Found It Near Rock Home Garden, In Illinois. The One I Have Looks Better Than Any You Showed. Different, Kinda More Tan. One Side Has Geometric Shapes. The Other Side Looks Like Kind of Tubes. It is My Favorite Rock. I Wish I Had A Camera So I Could Show You How Cool it Is. I Saw Your Picture, And Thought I Had Coral. I Am Glad, It Is Much More.
So, what I'm hearing it's not a prehistoric Subaru, Ah man
Sneaker treads from a time traveler
Fractal means self-similar across scales, so if you zoom in or out you see a similar or the same pattern.
That's just some tiled hexagons, not a fractal.
Fractals need not be self-similar at all, except in the most abstract sense. For instance, a rough coastline is a fractal insofar as it would display more-or-less equivalent roughness at any length-scale.
0:02 🙋🏻♂️ my guess Wasps
1 st bees lived underground
In the roots of trees
Something was living in spite of spiders well from them 😂
Webs were not just to catch water ya know 0:02
1:34 differ sizes and water source born 😂wasp nests 😊
Still my guess 😅
Mud 2:49 yup wasps 😊
So with no organic remains associated with the fossils, and no one home in the actual burrows on the sea floor (so far) are we sure this isnt some gas (or fluid) escape structure, which would be why it's so common in turbidites and near hydrothermal vents?
yeah, it's probably methane clathrates venting or something simple like that. As others have pointed out, bubbles under pressure form hexagons
I looked at this and thought to myself, that's some kind of formation coral would make. What else lives under the ocean, and makes extremely similar yet complex tubes? Could this be the leftover tubing sections from some kind of 500 million year old coral that has long since died out?
The modern "holes" with a similar pattern were found in the mid-Atlantic ridge, that's about 4.000 m deep. Much too deep for coral, even a very slow-growing one. I’m rather thinking a multiple organism full of holes, like a sponge maybe?
Plausible
Ok, so not so plausible
Would paleodictyon, glass sponges, and/or the xenophyophores have any connection to the Ediacaran fauna? They were also fractal creatures.
I was thinking the paleodictyon might, possibly, be a relic of ancient life.
One of my Favorite EONS. Well presented. Brava/o.
Sorry folks, it's just my old tennis shoes.
I bet it's eggs laid under a layer of sand, the dots on top are from them hatching and climbing out. It's why when they find them they are always empty. Of course I have no real idea but, maybe?
Doesn't explain the shape
@@Cruxador sure it does. Egg pods often have that shape. I already said that.
@@NocturnalToothbrush they’re hollow tubes that make a hexagon, not hollow hexagonal cells. Egg pods don’t make a hexagon with hollow tubed sides.
@@luckyblockyoshi Hollow because what use to be there is no longer there, the tubes could be where they climbed out to the surface,. And yes, some egg pods in nature are indeed hexagonal, it wouldn't be the first time that shape has appeared in nature.