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Sea Fossils Found in Mountains

Fossils turn up in the strangest places. The majority of them belong to sea creatures that have left impressions of their bones, their scales, their droppings or their shells in the right type of stone. People find them millions of years later, but often where they don't expect, such as on the tops of mountains. Millions of years ago, mountains existed differently from today, if at all, and many lay beneath hundreds of feet of sea water. Some of the most common fossils include shark's teeth, shelled creatures (sea snails), horn corals and brachiopods, which are like shellfish.

Glossopetrae
- Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist, believed that these strange triangular fossils he found embedded in stone fell from the sky. Much later on, burgeoning naturalists believed they were the tongues of serpents that Saint Paul had turned to stone. Their collective name of glossopetrae, or tongue stones, originated from that idea. They weren't actually stone tongues; they were ancient shark's teeth, such as those of megalodon and even older species. Shark's teeth are a common enough find amongst fossilized sea creatures, especially in certain areas, such as the Atlas Mountains in Morocco or even the High Inyo Mountains in California.
Gastropods
- Gastropods haven't gone extinct any more than sharks have. They are the family of land and sea creatures that include snails and slugs. As part of the phylum Mollusca, the largest marine family, these squishy creatures are related to octopus and oysters. In the Gastropod class, there are 3,994 genus listed -- by far the most numerous, and probably not all-inclusive. The reason for this is simple: scientists can readily classify snails because they leave their shells behind, but slugs are without shells; therefore, they don't leave much in the fossil record and go unknown. One place to find these fossils are the Franklin Mountains in El Paso, Texas.
Corals
- Just like today, corals require warm, shallow seas to survive. This is why whenever corals are found on mountain tops, it's a good bet that the mountain was either part of that shallow sea, or pushed up through one over many millions of years to become what it is today. A coral has a hard outer skeleton of sorts, which is how it can be easily found in fossils today. Horn coral is the better-known name for any coral in the extinct order Rugosa. They were widespread hundreds of millions of years ago, and can be found in flatter areas as well as mountainous ones from Utah to North Carolina, and down into Texas -- quite possibly even more places than that.
Brachiopods
- Brachiopods are two-shelled marine invertebrates much like clams; however, they are not in the same family. Molluscs are related to octopus and squid, while brachiopods are not as close. The best way to tell the difference is that a mollusc will have two shells, one on the left and right, while the brachiopod will have two shells, one on the top and one on the bottom. Also, these shells are mirror images of each other yet individually asymmetric, whereas the brachiopods are bilaterally symmetrical (like a slug). In other words, clams have identical shells, but brachiopods have slightly different ones that may overlap a bit near the end. All the same, because of the great die-off that occurred that made many species of brachiopod extinct, they are readily found in the ancient limestone and rock in places such as the Marble Mountains in the Mojave Desert.

Artifacts