FOSSILS IN LAKE

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 March 1939, Page 3

FOSSILS IN LAKE

STRANGE RUSSIAN FINDS A prehistoric “asphalt lake,” rich in animal fossils, has been discovered a few miles from the famous Soviet oil i city of Baku. Many centuries ago the lake, little more than 300 square yards in area and six feet deep, was a mass of sticky asphalt which glistened in the sun. In the early quaternary period hundreds of sabre-tooth tigers, primative wild horses, deer, bears, wolves, and other animals mistook the glistening I surface for water, plunged, into quench, their thirst and were caught forever in the"sticky morass. Vultures, birds of prey, jackals, hyenas, and other four-footed scavengers lured to the carcasses of the trapped animals, were in turn caught. It. was like a. huge piece of fly-paper. The properties of asphalt as an embalming agent, according to historian (Diodorus, were known to the Egyptians. The carcases of many of the animals trapped in the asphalt lake are in. an excellent state of preservation. Besides the prehistoric animals, the hake is said to be rich in the remains of many extant species. Excavations •are providing an excellent cross-section Jof the history of the fauna, of the J Caucasus. >’ The fossil wealth of the Baku “Asp- - halt Lake." which is compared by /paleontologists to the famous “Tar [Lake” in Southern California, was disl covered by a group of young Soviet J geology students on an excursion. >' A commission of the Russian Acad- . emy of Sciences is conducting the ex- * cava I ions and is exploring other sections of the Baku oilfields for similar -, finds. —“Observer.”