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Originally Posted by insane_cobra
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That's a sad story. I know that underground fires happened in the Grube Messel (The Messel Pit. It's an UNESCO World Heritage site), when the bituminous shale that used to be mined there burned quietly (Though the flooding from all the rain was a much higher priority, the last time I was in the Messel pit). . That alone is bad enough, because the Messel Pit is a source of dozens of unique Fossils (one of them is the famous prehistoric horse, whose official name is "Hyracotherium". But it has been named double, just like Brontosaurus [that's not his official name either]. The official name is boring and not really pretty: Hyracotherium" means "Mole Beast". But the inofficial name is beautiful: "Eohippus" - "Pferd der Morgenröte"/"Horse of Dawn"/"Horse of the Morning Red"/"Dawn Horse". Pity that it was found it already had the other name.), which often have soft parts preserved as well as the usual hard body parts (even beetle wings and the original colours and shine of some beetles chitinous shell are preserved. It's amazing, really.). I myself own a plastic cast (since the fossils from the Messel Pit are wet fossils, they have to be treated immediately in order for them to last. They even found a way of preserving the colours on the casts these days. In the past they were just able to preserve the shape, sadly.) of a huge fish (the fish is a bit longer than my keyboard. It's name is
Lepisosteus and it is from the middle Eocene. That family of fish still exists these days. They are called "Gar", I think.), and you can see every single scale and some of the fins (the fish is a bit shattered especially in the head, after all it was buried under quite a bit of earth for some 50,000,000 years.). But all together it is amazingly well preserved. It's all still linked, for one.
But in the case of Centralia, there were peoples' lives involved, so it's a much bigger tragedy.
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