Oh we had the best free family fun day, showing friends around the Waitaki region. Key highlights are the Elephant Rocks in Duntroon, the whale fossil just 1 min up the road, and then some peaceful scraping of ancient limestone to reveal the remnants of creatures from millions of years ago... The Vanished World Centre is a really cool experience, its worth the small fee to help teach your kids about the geology in the are The geology here, connects to Timaru's story... next time, when you look at a block of Oamaru limestone on our Council Building, imagine all the tiny fossil remains of ancient creatures, and the Diatom.
Thirty-five million years ago, the Oamaru area was under the sea. Tiny algae living in the water (called diatoms) became preserved in sediment (called diatomite).
In the late 1800s, Victorian era scientists and enthusiasts would arrange diatoms and display them in beautiful arrangements that could only be seen under a microscope.Diatoms have beautiful geometric shapes. They can survive extreme cold and can even be found on the undersides of ice shelves in the Arctic and Antarctic. Diatoms take silicon out of the water to build shells of silicon dioxide (glass) called the frustule.
Diatoms usually reproduce by splitting in half. The top and bottom separate, then each grows the missing half. Each “daughter” diatom ends up a little bit smaller than the original. As the diatoms continue this process, the offspring get smaller and smaller until the diatoms know it is time to use their other method of reproduction: they make egg and sperm cells that will join to form baby diatoms. These babies grow until they reach full size. Then it’s back to splitting in half again.
