Naour Gryphaea

A wide variety of fossils can be found in the loose silt and clay to  the west of the town of Naour, where the road to the Dead Sea provides excellent sections in limestone formations from the Mesozoic era (248 to 65 million years).

 

The dark gray to olive green marl and siltstone is highly fossiliferous, containing a wide range of  bivalves, gastropods, and ammonites. This dark gray siltstone provides a good environment for fossils such as Gryphaea to develop a crust of shiny crystals of Chalcopyrite (fools gold).

 

This Graphia collection comes from "Fuhays Formation" (120 million years old).

 

The location where these fossils were collected is now about eight hundred meters above sea level.

When these fossils were alive they lived within tidal-lagoonal and open-marine environments.

To avoid commercial exploitation, the exact location can be given only for scientific purposes. 

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