Fossils on Mars - A Collection of Evidence

[zorgon]

Fossils on Mars - A Collection of Evidence

This thread has been recreated from our old forum and Russo has given his time to help me move the posts and data to this site.  I have gone through each one to edit them for continuity and errors generated by the move, like image locations etc. At the end of the relocated posts I will make a marker that will indicate all new material comes after that marker. Thanks to Russo for the effort in this endeavor.

Below is a fresh water frozen lake in a crater on Mars found by the ESA. I find it amazing that few people on other forums are aware of this find and still argue whether or not there is water on Mars  . I will cover the water and other Martian anomalies in other threads, but in a thread about possible fossils on Mars, I thought starting with a Martian lake would be appropriate. 

[zorgon]

Fossils on Mars - A Collection of Evidence

Okay time to get serious...

I have been planning to put this all on one thread for some time, though we have shown examples in several threads.

I have a lot of material on this one so please refrain from posting until I get it all posted so it won't interrupt the flow... This will take me awhile to pull all the related files and double check the links etc... Thanks for your patience

This thread was originally created as a challenge by some skeptics at that other site regarding the creation of a serious thread in contrast to the usual 'sensational titles' that draw the crowd. Well I did a test... ran two sensational titles and this one. While this one recieved 3 applauses from staff, it barely made it past page one of replies, in the same time the other two threads hit 15 pages each. And guess what? Those who challenged me never even stopped by.

About 6 months later one moderator asked me why I don't do a thread on Martian fossils...



Exhibit 1

Gusev Crater Spirit Rover Sol 386
Lichen Like Fossil

Microscopic Imaging Camera and the RAT abrasive tool

In the image below you will see a circle cut into the rock by the RAT and in the center is a very interesting object. I have added two items from Earth for comparison.



Here is the original source

NASA Rover Gallery

And the full size image

Fossil Flower on Earth



Lichen on Earth



In another frame you can see two more circular 'fossils' (in the boxes) that have not been drilled...

Opportunity Rover
Endurance Crater Sol 125
Corals?

Highlighted in yellow boxes



NASA Rover Gallery

Full image...

Continued next post...

[zorgon]

Exhibit 2

Opportunity Rover Digs for Fossils
Sol 30 to Sol 33

The Famous "Rotelli Fossil"

One of the most famous anomalies talked about is the "Rotelli" fossil. It was found in these images and is one of the best case samples for life on Mars to date. It was called "rotelli" because of its shape, looking like rotelli pasta on Earth.

The name of this one was coined by NASA so don't shoot the messenger



Okay now that you have had your laugh (don't forget the "Blueberries" another NASA name), lets get on with it...





Some of the images containing the 'fossils' are listed below. Opportunity spent several days drilling in this area.

1M130859833EFF0454P2959M2M1.JPG
1M131117213EFF0454P2953M2M1.JPG
1M131117272EFF0454P2953M2M1.JPG
1M131117332EFF0454P2953M2M1.JPG

NASA SOL 30

NASA SOL 33

Below I have highlighted several interesting areas as well as two drill marks.



There are many other samples that we found in these images and a few are highlighted below... a "Rotelli" and a "Turritella"....





Three very good specimens of  "Turritella"....

Earth specimen for comparison



Raw Clip...



Highlighted clip



Direct Comparison



According to NASA



A close-up of the Last Chance rock after it was RAT-treated reveals a tiny spiral-like object (red arrow), likened to curved macaroni, set in a texture that itself is "mysterious". The object may be a cutting artifact of the abrasion tool or it may be a natural, intrinsic component of the rock. Among speculatiions: it is a fossilized organism, but that view is quite tentative. However, some "optimists" are already claiming to see 'nebulous' evidence of other life forms. Visit this MER fossils website for a pictorial summary of such conjectures.

NASA

[zorgon]

Exhibit 3

Despite this bombardment, very primitive life had already formed by 3.5 billion years ago. To the  left are micro bacteria fossils of this age (used as the standard against which to judge the claims for micro bacteria in the meteorite from Mars). (J. W. Schopf, http://www.astrobiology.ucla.edu/)



SOURCE: University of Arizona

Exhibit 4

Spirit Rover Sol 1144
The Case for Turritellas

The image below is reduced so go get the full size version



Full Size...

Spirit Rover on Sol 1144

I also have a false color version available... created from the filters..



Full size...

ArMaP first pointed this one out to us in one of Mike's threads... He saw a hand but I will let him talk about that one My interest is in the turritellas for this thread.

"I have found a "critter" too!
See in this image, it looks like a hand or a paw trying to get from under the rocks in the middle of the image, to the right. But that does not mean that I think it is a fossil or even a living creature, but that I find this rock even stranger than the others, I really do." - ArMaP

Clips











The conical spirals are very clear in this clipping. These two specimens are just below ArMaP's "hand"



The conical spiral of a "Turritella" specimen in the center, with an interesting hexagonal piece beside it. This one is above and to the right of the "hand"





Hexagonal fossil on Earth



Continued next post...

[zorgon]

Exhibit 5

NASA Evidence From Mars

Some time ago I found a NASA presentation given at a Science symposium by Chief Scientist Dr Jim Garvin...

I am going to add it here as intermission... and to show that NASA does play tricks on us all...

Here is the opening...



The image above is taken from a NASA Power Point Slide Presentation on Life on Mars....  The Cartoon is funny, but its also an "In Your Face" comment directly from NASA...  Below is the entire slide from the presentation.



"NASA Searching for life on Mars. Are we Ready?" - Jim Garvin



Also in the presentation for the scientists were two images I found fascinating

THE GARVIN TRILOBITE



THE GARVIN ARTIFACT



Pretty amazing images yes? Here is the slide they were on..

"Scientific outcomes can be largely unknown" - Jim Garvin



Now ArMaP and I did extensive work to identify these two anomalies, because quite obviously coming from NASA these would be quite a spectacular discovery... After months of looking ArMaP found "White Boat Rock" (the one with the artifact) (Humphrey was easy to find)

Only problem is when we got the high res images and the color set.. THERE WAS NO FOSSIL or ARTIFACT... at least in the copies we had access to.

SO that means either they were removed... OR the presentation was a deception. As nothing in the presentation indicates it was a 'joke', and the fact that Dr Jim Garvin refuses to answer any emails (at least from us ) it presents a dilemma 

Doctored Photos? or Deliberate Obfuscation?

Well since I found Sojourner out in the Desert behind Johns house last year...





The work and images that ArMap and I did on these two items is here..
EVIDENCE FROM NASA

The file that the slide were from is here
NASA: Dr Jim Garvin  - Mars_Search for Life Slide_Presentation PDF

GARVIN PDF

Continued next post...

[zorgon]

Exhibit 6

Much Ado about Fossils
Opportunity :: Microscopic Imager :: Sol 034



The image above is one of the best case images so far for fossils in Martian rocks. This one was posted on Richard Hoagland's site Enterprise Mission and he goes into great detail on issues surrounding this discovery. Below we have highlighted the three main areas of interest... From my years of experience hunting fossils in the field I would say these were indeed fossils... looking exactly like round corals embedded into the rock.

Full size image from NASA

NASA ROVER GALLERY

Highlighted main objects of interest



Opportunity also took a second set of three images on that day... It too has a drill...  Now this is where I have to disagree STRONGLY with Hoagland..

The image below was taken on the same day, and shows three RAT drill holes roughly in the same configuration as the above fossils...



It is Hoagland's contention that NASA deliberately destroyed the three fossils to cover it up...

First of all let me touch on that issue... IF NASA had ground a fossil to dust... this would be a GOOD thing, as its on board analyzers could then determine if compounds were in the material that indicated organic chemicals... and where there is one fossil there would be thousands... just look at any well known fossil site on Earth where they literally weather out of the host rock and just lie around for the picking

But if you look at both images two things pop up... the texture of the rock is totally different and the holes, while similar, do not match exactly.

NASA ROVER GALLERY

Here is Hoagland's presentation



ENTERPRIZE MISSION

This is the kind of stuff that hurts us all... even non experts in rock can see the texture difference

It even comes with two cartoons by Steve Troy..


© 2004 Steve Troy with permission


© 2004 Steve Troy with permission

And just for the "Its only Rocks" crowd... my daughter spotted this one and colored it... pretty amazing actually... makes one wonder who has..

The Last Laugh
What? ANOTHER Face on Mars?



Continued next post...

[zorgon]

Exhibit 7

This is an old one... first presented by Joseph Skipper at
http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/

He had circle the two 'skulls' and when I pulled the original files I spotted several other pieces that had the look of bones and fragments of bones...

Here is the clip from the best image...(it appears in several in the set)



Here is the full size...

NASA ROVER GALLERY

In the following clip the Green circles are Skippers, the white are mine (best pieces) and the yellow are maybes



Later on as this area was studied by several people Papajake colorized the individual pieces..

Fossils Revisited

posted by Papajake, a member of ATS on 21-3-2007 @ 11:03 AM THIS POST
"I started colorizing what I thought might be fossils, but there was so many that I just stopped. Nearly the whole photo looks like a fossil field mixed with dirt and rock."

Closeup Clips

This is one of the best samples in the above image because you can see the porous nature of the "bone" fragment



This one is round as well as curved along its length. There are branches and the end gives indications of it being hollow



Similar piece, also round, a feet inches away from the one above. There is a third piece a little more to the right, partially buried



"Diapsida Skull"

Now this one has to be by far one of the best pieces of evidence of past life on Mars... nostril holes, eye sockets and beak...



"Diapsida Breastbone"

Best description I can think of...



More interesting fragments...







Gilmoreteius Skull

This specimen was found in the Gobi Desert fossil fields



And yes they DO just lie around on the surface in a desert as the wind blows away the sand and erodes the harder fossils out of the stone... same with shale rocks where water erodes the softer stone leaving the fossils behind

Guillermo Rougier hunts for early mammal fossil in Mongolia's Gobi Desert




THE END

For now

8-)

[zorgon]

reply to post by Vector J

Ah yes this could quite possibly be true... and could easily have been addressed with a short reply to emails  at a site that LISTS his email for questions

Now it is also possible that my 'reputation' precedes me though I have gotten replies from the HiRise team...

Perhaps some else would have better luck?



Dr Jim Garvin

PRESENT POSITION:
    Geoscientist/Topographic Remote Sensing specialist and Project Scientist, Earth System Science Pathfinder Project at NASA's GSFC, Geodynamics Branch, Lab for Terrestrial Physics

    CURRENT ACTIVITIES:
    Chief Scientist, Shuttle Laser Altimeter (SLA)
    Project Scientist, ESSP
    Co-Investigator, MOLA Experiment, Mars Global Surveyor
    Principal Investigator, Landscape Monitoring of Iceland using RADARSAT
    Principal Investigator, Topo. Monitoring of Mt. Rainier

http://core2.gsfc.nasa.gov/personal_pages/garvin/garvin.html

[zorgon]

Originally posted by Blaine91555
I may be wrong but that looks like it has been manipulated, added or enhanced.

Yes that was the whole point it WAS manipulated but until we found the originals to look at we had no way to know this...

Since the images are in the NASA presentation at the time there was only NASA's word... with no explanation

Now to have put all the data and full images into the thread would not have fit so I linked to THIS PAGE

That has all the data, all the links to the original images we found and worked with. The reason I create the pages is so I don't have to repost it every time and slow down the thread loading anymore than I already do

Sadly few ever follow the links...

The point on this was that the presentation was not for the public in general but for a science symposium. I found it by fluke originally...

So was this done as a joke for the presentation, was it done to 'muddy the waters', or are the images we did find edited? Since there was no image # provided in the NASA paper... it took a long time to find them.  Thanks to ArMaP for tracking them down

The rock 'Humphry' is a chuck of Basalt... its black that has been whitened and polished smooth by wind... As such there could be no fossil in it as basalt is volcanic not sedimentary...

So why did they chose to present it in that way? One image showing an obvious fossil Trilobite and the other an artifact?

I would have loved to hear that presentation

[zorgon]

Originally posted by darkraver
cause rovers and landers up there don't even have the real organic analyzing apparatus to my knowledge...
at least not those that the general public knows of...

Well not quite true my friend 

Couple notes passed on to me from someone 'in the field'

"The Lunar Ranger utilized alpha-scatter identification capability along with LLRI capability used to determine soil composition... "

"For example, the Mars Rover (Spirit) is actually a micro-mining laboratory, complete with (2) spectrometers and other processing equipment/instrumentation. "

Scientists today reported initial impressions from using Spirit's alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, Mössbauer spectrometer and microscopic imager on a patch of soil that was directly in front of the rover after Spirit drove off its lander Jan. 15.

"We're starting to put together a picture of what the soil at this particular place in Gusev Crater is like. There are some puzzles and there are surprises," said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the suite of instruments on Spirit and on Spirit's twin, Opportunity.

One unexpected finding was the Mössbauer spectrometer's detection of a mineral called olivine, which does not survive weathering well. This spectrometer identifies different types of iron-containing minerals; scientists believe many of the minerals on Mars contain iron. "This soil contains a mixture of minerals, and each mineral has its own distinctive Mössbauer pattern, like a fingerprint," said Dr. Goestar Klingelhoefer of Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, lead scientist for this instrument.

The lack of weathering suggested by the presence of olivine might be evidence that the soil particles are finely ground volcanic material, Squyres said. Another possible explanation is that the soil layer where the measurements were taken is extremely thin, and the olivine is actually in a rock under the soil.

Scientists were also surprised by how little the soil was disturbed when Spirit's robotic arm pressed the Mössbauer spectrometer's contact plate directly onto the patch being examined. Microscopic images from before and after that pressing showed almost no change. "I thought it would scrunch down the soil particles," Squyres said. "Nothing collapsed. What is holding these grains together?

in another clip we have this...

Information from another instrument on the arm, an alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, may point to an answer. This instrument "measures X-ray radiation emitted by Mars samples, and from this data we can derive the elemental composition of Martian soils and rocks," said Dr. Johannes Brueckner, rover science team member from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany. The instrument found the most prevalent elements in the soil patch were silicon and iron. It also found significant levels of chlorine and sulfur, characteristic of soils at previous Martian landing sites but unlike soil composition on Earth

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20040120a.html

Well since I am currently out of fossils I will toss in a few other minerals into the pot...

[zorgon]

Here is a picture of the salts stirred up using the Rover wheels as a digging tool..
Spirit :: Panoramic Camera :: Sol 788





Here is a specimen of Vesicular Basalt from the same location
Spirit :: Panoramic Camera :: Sol 736



And here is a piece from Nevada in my collection - for color reference

[zorgon]

And here are the Hematite nodules in sedimentary rock that NASA has labeled "Blueberries" :lol:  Gotta love those scientists eh?

Opportunity :: Panoramic Camera :: Sol 037



A few close ups







Opportunity :: Panoramic Camera :: Sol 040



But my absolute favorite is THIS one.. Mike Singh's MARTIAN SNAIL 

[zorgon]

Here are similar ones on Earth







http://www.thelivingmoon.com/43ancients/02files/Mars_Images_04.html#Study

[zorgon]

Originally posted by bloodcircle
And to be honest, it looks like an old car door handle.

HEY NOW Great find... thanks I do believe you are right :up:  I would say a pretty good match...  Mind if I clip that for reference? At least NASA has a sense of humor... something a few more here at ATS could use

[zorgon]

Egg found in Martian Meteorite

The Tissint Mars meteorite "egg"

SCIENTISTS claim this egg-shaped object is the final proof of life on Mars after finding it inside a meteorite from the Red Planet.

Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe said the globule from the rock named Tissint is rich in carbon and oxygen and insisted they could only have been produced by living organisms.

He added that they could not have been caused by contamination when they fell to Earth.

Prof Wickramasinghe, 72 — famous for controversial ideas such as that the flu virus and even life itself was brought to our planet by comets — said: "It is impossible to understand how carbon-rich particles of such uniform sizes and shapes got inside a rocky matrix if they are not relics of some algal species.

"Tissint was collected weeks after it fell, and terrestrial contamination seems unlikely. In any case the structures we found were on newly fractured surfaces, from the interior of the meteorite."

The meteorite was named after the village where it came down in the Sahara desert in Morocco last July.

http://meteorito-meteorite.blogspot.com/

DISCOVERY OF BIOLOGICAL STRUCTURES IN THE TISSINT MARS METEORITE

Summary. Preliminary SEM/EDAX studies of the Tissint meteorite shows projections of interior spherical globules rich in C and O. Such concentrations of carbonaceous material in a matrix of mineral grains poses a mystery if biological processes are excluded. They are consistent with remnants of biological structures, thus supporting earlier similar claims for the Mars meteorite ALH84001..

Key Words: Meteorites, Mars meteorite, panspermia, exobiology

The Tissint meteorite, identified as a meteorite from Mars, fell onto the Morrocan desert some 30 miles south of the village of Tissint on June 18, 2011. Shattered pieces of the meteorite were recovered in October 2011, and is only just coming to be analysed and studied. A thick fusion crust that surrounds the meteorite fragments give confidence in the assertion that the interior material is pristine and uncontaminated. Its mineralogic characterisation as olivine-phyric shergottite of Martian origin appears to be well accepted, with a most likely origin in a relatively young lava regolith that solidified 400-500 million years ago. The meteorite has been found to contain pockets of Martian atmosphere which also confirms its Martian origin

.

Official Paper:

http://journalofcosmology.com/JOC18/TissintFinal.pdf

Here is another copy of the image with size reference from Hortonheardawho



http://www.flickr.com/photos/hortonheardawho/7129365787/sizes/o/in/photostream/

Official classification from LPI

[ex]Basic information    Name: Tissint
This is an OFFICIAL meteorite name.
Abbreviation: There is no official abbreviation for this meteorite.
Observed fall: Yes
Year fell: 2011
Country: Morocco
Mass:help 7 kg
Classification - Recommended:  Martian (shergottite)
This is 1 of 86 approved meteorites (plus 1 unapproved name) classified as Martian (shergottite).[/ex]

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meteor/metbull.php?code=54823


Another sample of a Martian meteorite from the Tissint fall, which dropped chunks of the Red Planet in the Moroccan desert in July 2011.
CREDIT: © 2011 Darryl Pitt / Macovich Collection

http://www.space.com/14268-rare-mars-meteorite-rocks-tissint.html

"There's at least 11 kilos [24 pounds]," Pitt told SPACE.com.

Pitt said he had acquired more than 4.4 pounds (2 kg) of Tissint meteorites. He has been trading and selling pieces to collectors, museums and researchers around the globe, at prices ranging from $8,500 per ounce to $28,350 per ounce ($300 to $1,000 per gram), depending on the sample.

As of Tuesday, gold was selling for about $1,650 per ounce ($58 per gram).

"It's pristine material," Pitt said. "Five hundred dollars and $600 a gram for a freshly fallen chunk of the planet Mars? I'd say that's a deal."

Oh great.... just what I needed... some idiot driving up the price  I was hoping to get a chunk before it went too high