I sat on the tan, dusty ground of the quarry in north central Iowa, fingers grasping at the shell that lay halfway buried in the chalky clay and limestone. Wiggling it back and forth, I gently pulled it up from the ground that it had been resting in for millions of years. The ridged shell was almost perfectly intact, painting me a detailed picture of what the animal looked like. I had found a brachiopod fossil, a marine invertebrate who used to live in the warm, shallow sea of the Devonian Period, roughly 380 million years ago. As I sat examining my find, I couldn’t help but think about how special it is to find something so ancient, to hold the remnants of their life in my hand, and glimpse what life on Earth was like millions of years ago.

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