Grey Highlands Rocks

What is this Rock?

On November 10th between 1-4 pm I went to the rock identification event at South Grey Museum with the rock shown above. Geologist Peter von Bitter, a museum member and curator at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto was there to identify it for me. I had no idea what it was.

Peter told me that it was a Stromatoporoid, a kind of sponge 430 million years old. (Give or take a million or so) It is a colonial creature which means that it is a lot of small creatures living together to form a larger formation.

It started out as CaCo3 and is later replaced by Quartz and it is from the Niagara Escarpment. It was found in Eugenia. It was probably carried here by the glaciers during the ice age.