It's a rare occasion when a person can find remnants of the prehistoric world in his or her own backyard. But residents of eastern Moscow can do just that today.
That's because someone — it's still unclear who — delivered the wrong kind of soil to Moscow's Izmaylovo district. Instead of black soil, the neighborhood got prehistoric clay containing the remains of molluscs from the Jurassic Period, the TASS news agency reported Wednesday.
The Archaeology Foundation, a Russian non-profit, discovered the unusual earth. "A closer look at the clay revealed a lot of prehistoric fossils. Most of them are shellfish – ammonites and belemnites – that used to live in the sea located where Moscow and the Moscow region are now,” a spokesperson for the foundation told TASS.
According to the foundation's specialists, these creatures went extinct 65 million years ago, just like the dinosaurs. Archaeologists have already collected the most interesting and unique fossils from Izmaylovo for research. However, there are still plenty left to be discovered by locals interested in paleontology, the Archaeology Foundation noted in an Instagram post.
The ancient clay is located on the lawn next to building 50/20 on Shcherbakovskaya ulitsa.
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