Perfect Trilobite Fossil On Bounce Rock
This is the clearest and most irrefutable proof yet
After combing through the many thousands of images and also performing many hundreds of hours of image processing and reviewing, I came across this beautiful specimen. This is the clearest and most perfect trilobite I have yet found. I have seen dozens of small, rolled up or broken ones in the microscopic images, but this one stands out and says volumes all by itself.
| This is the lower
center of Bounce rock from the original color image that NASA
released. Here is the original
image from the NASA site.
Right at the center of this image is a trilobite that shows the cephalon and pygidium in very good detail. No mineral process would produce such a clear and unambiguous image as this at random. The white dust is from the RAT (rock abrasion tool) grinding a hole in the rock previously. Next is the contrast enhanced and outlined version so people who are unfamiliar with trilobites can recognize the shape and orientation. To the right is a terrestrial trilobite fossil (gray). |
 |
What can be said? This is clearly a fossil of a trilobite, organisms that lived from about half a billion years ago to 210 million years ago on the Earth. Mars evolved identical sorts of life forms and this trilobite is proof of that. If this rock is on Mars, then so were trilobites, squids, sea urchins, sharks, sand dollars, and all sorts of aquatic organisms.
Mars was a world very much like the Earth with oceans and sea life and only because of its small size did it lose its atmosphere and oceans. We now have proof of this thanks to the many rovers and landers that have explored Mars since 1976 starting with Project Viking. We also know now that in all likelihood, life is common throughout the universe. I estimate that there must be at least ten billion worlds with life in our galaxy alone.
NOTE: It has been suggested that the RAT produced the trilobite "marking" by accident. This is not possible. Here is the footage showing the RAT in action on Bounce rock, and you will see that it never touches the area where the trilobite is located. Even imagining what sort of complex movements would be needed to produce a fake trilobite (and the reasons for doing it at all!) given the tools on the arm is difficult. Checking the "before" and "after" images show that there are no resulting rock chips from such a hypothetical operation.
Bounce rock is sedimentary, not igneous
NASA has recently released a statement that this rock is igneous. As anyone might know, a living organism is not very likely to leave a print in molten lava. It would be burned in the process and leave nothing recognizable behind. The solution is simple. This sedimentary rock is made from an igneous mineral. This happens when igneous rock dust or sand is precipitated in water and bonded together over time. A similar process can also happen without significant water, using compression only. We can see that much of Mars' surface appears covered with igneous rocks, so this is a very credible hypothesis. And, the earliest readings of Bounce Rock showed a composition almost identical to that of the Martian soil.
Here is the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer page from Cornell. Note the signatures in the bar graph- they show the comparison of composition for two chemical components for 2 * MgO/FeO and Al2O3/CaO. You can see that they are significantly different. Some will claim that this is the instrument at fault but I can see that this result (like many others) is subject to interpretation. There are significant differences that do not prove that Bounce is igneous- only that its component minerals are. Some of the Martian meteorites are indeed of similar composition to Bounce rock, but that is to be expected- they came from Mars.
My conclusion? Bounce is a sedimentary rock made from the igneous sand and silt of Mars. The fossils are not in an igneous rock at all- that is clearly ludicrous. The presence of squid fossils (see sol 065 images) shows this, as does the trilobite. This means that there is no conflict between NASA's statement about its composition and the presence of the fossils. It is only a matter of interpretation of the data.
My theory is now supported by scientist Phil Christensen of Arizona State University- read here
This is a quote from a news article just published in the BBC News on May 18th, 2004:
"Most exciting is the basalt signature in the layered cliffs," said Professor Phil Christensen, of Arizona State University, Tempe, US, and lead scientist for the Mini-TES.
"Basalt is volcanic in origin, but the thinness of the layers visible in the cliffs suggests they were emplaced some way other than as flows of lava.
"Our working hypothesis is that volcanically erupted rock was broken down into particles that were then transported and redeposited by wind or by liquid water."
The original article is found here, where you can read it in its entirety.
In other words, these volcanic rocks can be broken into particles (like sand) and then carried and deposited by water. What he is saying is that the mini-TES will not be able to tell whether the basalt is one piece or many small pieces. This is exactly my contention about Bounce Rock. Case closed.