1. Animals Encased in Stone
In 1821,
Tilloch's Philosophical Magazine carried an unusual item about a stone mason named David Virtue who made an astonishing discovery while working on a large chunk of rock that had come from about 22 feet below the surface. Upon breaking it open "he found a lizard embedded in the stone. It was coiled up in a round cavity of its own form, being an exact impression of the animal. It was about an inch and a quarter long, of a brownish yellow color, and had a round head, with bright sparkling projecting eyes. It was apparently dead, but after being about five minutes exposed to the air it showed signs of life. It soon ran about with much celerity."
There are numerous documented accounts of such findings, mostly involving frogs, toads or lizards. Most often the animals come out alive. And very often there is an imprint of their skin or shape on the cavity in which they are entombed. And this raises a number of interesting questions: How could the animal have gotten in there and survived? How did rock - which geology tells us takes hundreds if not thousands of years to form - take shape around the animal? How long could the animal have been in there?