If you see someone at a subway stop walking at a turtle pace while staring at the ground, don't scare yourself.You are probably looking for remains of hidden prehistoric animals among tiles.Although it looks like science fiction, Madrid is full of fossils.The streets, portals, monuments, shopping centers, hotels of hotels ... Everything that is built with sedimentary rock is likely to keep organic remains of tens of millions of years.
Rubén Santos Alonso, a geologist by profession, explains that “you have to be predisposed, with the attentive eye, because when you explain it you already see them everywhere.Once you start, you can't stop. ”Those stairs that we climb every day and in which we had never repaired, suddenly, a special meaning to discover that they house a colony of ammonites, snail -shaped mollusks that existed 400 million years ago.
To find them it is easier, Rubén launched in 2012 a collaborative platform, www.palaurbana.com.Taking advantage of a few months in unemployment, this geologist based in Vitoria and specialized in flood risks created "an interactive map for people from all over the world to contribute the discoveries of it."Although it has locations from the five continents, Europe and North America are more protagonists and Spain, France and Portugal stand out above other countries.
On this website of urban fossils you can find about thirty addresses in the Community of Madrid, but there are many more.Rubén explains that it only shows public places, but receiving countless messages with photos of trapped remains "in bars bathrooms, restaurant kitchens countertops, including bulletproofs built with exotic materials brought from far away."For example, the floor of the South Park shopping center, in Leganés, houses a collection of ammonites and gastropods so clear that it gives the impression of being painted on the slab.Santos Alonso also recalls the reception of a central hotel in the capital that seems covered from a fish bank.They are fossils, prehistoric skeletons with the appearance of swimming the walls.
Metro platforms seem propitious for the hunting of urban fossils.The stops of Méndez Álvaro, Metropolitano, University City or García Noblejas exhibit in their limestone coatings traces of the Cretaceous.It is convenient to locate before the website not to waste much time to locate these bivalves, corals or ammonites.Although it seems incredible, very few know of their existence and not even the person who cleans them every day is aware of the treasures he is in care.
The creator of Paleourbana has his own list of favorite places in Madrid.At the base of the monument to Cervantes, in the Plaza de España, you can see oncolites and small skeletal remains of the tertiary dating from 66 million years ago.It is not the only monument with surprise.The one that rises in memory of Lope de Vega, in the monastery of the Incarnation, keeps bivalves and corals of the Cretaceous.
What gets you out of bed in the morning? 🌞 Realizing your calling in life is both a spiritual experience and a pow… https://t.co/Y1FKzLDNgl
— FriesenPress Thu Jul 22 20:04:03 +0000 2021
The architectural budget and fashion of the time when the building in question was raised marks the type of material used and increases the possibilities of finding this kind of polls in history.The lack of sedimentary rock quarries (igneous origin) in Madrid led to the importation, above all, of ornamental stone of the Basque Country for the subway stations.
This way of approaching paleontology seems to Rubén the ideal way because “thus the deposits are not damaged.As soon as a new location is announced, people try to get material and take it. ”It is clear that this type of fossils, preserved "ad eternum" in a stone turned into construction material, resists the passage of time and the attack of friends of others.Temptation disappears in the face of the physical impossibility of stealing the fossil, although, sometimes, the finding is so important that it ends up being transferred for study.
This was the case of the discovery in Gerona of a series of traces that are not common in the pavement of a street.The tweet community failed to identify its origin until a group of experts ended up determining that it was Sirenids, a kind of marine mammals.The skull was so well preserved that they requested permission to withdraw the slab and proceed to their formal observation.
Twitter has become the perfect environment to share new fossils or marvel at the discoveries of others.Last summer there was a thread that went viral of Inés Fernández, author of the blog "My trips around", which quickly added thousands of retweets and the general astonishment against a reality that they did not know.Inés explains that her fans have come since she was little, when she found "a snail under my bed."Her parents had to explain what that was because each person who entered her room was taught that animal "turned into stone" millions of years ago.
In this universe of collaborative paleontology there was a finding that Rubén remembers with special emotion: "It was a dinosaur footprint in a small German town, on the sandstone facade of a museum."In our country, the oldest remains located in an urban environment are devonic, about 420 million years ago, mostly stromatoporid corals (marine organisms that formed reefs).The creator of Paleourbana is still arriving through Twitter or email photographs of the fossils found in Spanish cities.Many times the authors are children, small aspiring paleontologists who discover that they have "Jurassic Park" at the door of the house.
