Seashell mystery solved - but sorry, no Dinosaurs.

By Richard Charan

So the experts at the University of the West Indies and elsewhere have done their own digging. The seashells that were, inexplicably, found buried by the billions in the ground nowhere close to a beach, have been analysed by people with titles and jobs that are difficult to spell and even harder to pronounce.

The investigation was made possible by excavator operator Bob Ramoutar, who last month unearthed the shells while bulldozing private lands for a housing development off La Cuesa Road, Freeport, eight miles from Trinidad's gulf coast.

Ramoutar preserved the site to allow for an examination by geologists Sushma Chatelal and Curtis Archie, Petrotrin employees who are respectively, the president and president-elect of the Geological Society of Trinidad and Tobago. So here's a summary of the findings of Dr Brent Wilson -senior lecturer in Paleontology and Sedimentology, Petroleum Geosciences Programme, at UWI's Department of Chemical Engineering.

-No, the shells were not dumped there by some ancient civilisation dining on seafood. The seashells are so old, people weren't invented yet. Yes, at some point in time, the land where the shells were found was the ocean.

- No, we are not going to find dinosaur bones no matter how much we dig. While the shells were deposited between 2,300,000 and 5,600,000 years ago, that was long after dinosaurs ruled and went extinct (the last one kicked the bucket about 65 million years ago, after ruling the world for 100 million years).

A more precise age for the shells will be determined using radioactive isotopes (something about protons and neutron and atoms) from samples to be sent to Rutgers University in New Jersey, United States.

And yes, there are certainly more seashell sites far from shore buried under our jungle vegetation, waiting to be found. What Bob Ramoutar first thought was buried treasure may turn lead to black gold - the formation may help oil explorers find hydrocarbon deposits.

This is what Dr Wilson reported:

To a geoscientist, any outcrop of rock tells a story such as whether the rock was erupted from a volcano, deposited by a river or laid down in the deep ocean, or metamorphosed by extreme pressures and temperatures during mountain building.

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