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Product Description
Turritella Agate Natural Shell Fossil Polished Rock
This fossil embedded brown semiprecious stone is called Turritella Agate.
The piece is sliced and polished on one side left natural rough fossils on the back!
This unique specimen is 5 inches by 2 inches and .8 inch at its thickest.
This one does not stand on its own.
Although people have called this material Turritella Agate for several decades, the name is actually incorrect. It was mistakenly named after a genus of fossil snails that are very similar to the shells in the agate.
The proper name of the snails is "Elimia tenera," a member of the Pleuroceridae family.
These snails are characterized by turreted, cone shaped shells exhibiting long slender whorls with spiral ribbing. The shells of Elimia are distinguishable from real Turritella by being generally shorter and wider.
This semiprecious fossil gemstone material Turritella Agate is from the early and middle parts of the Eocene Epoch, between around 53 and 42 million years ago.
The spiral-shaped shells accumulated in the sediments of a shallow inland sea in an area that we now know as Wamsutter, Wyoming.
A few lenses of snail-bearing sediment, in what is today known as the Green River Formation, were then agatized by the deposition of fine-grained silica into the cavities of the shells and the voids between them.
