Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 January 1912 — HAPPENINGS IN THE CITIES [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

HAPPENINGS IN THE CITIES

Find Petrified Daddy of All Lobsters

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—The progenitor of all the lobsters and the original oyster that existed eons before the first man who was brave enough to swallow ond, have been added to the geological collection of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, apd they are only two of 2,G00 specimens of petrified remains of prehistoric creatures gathered by Prof. Hervey Shimer and Mrs. Shimer during a six months* tour of Bohemia, France, England, Ireland, Wales and other countries. The lobster, a fine specimen, existed about 50,000,000 years ago, the geologists calculate. It was found in the mountains near Bohemia and many miles from the sea. This is not to say that lobsters grew on trees in those remote days; the

water, receding in the course of ages, left the lobster stranded and he got petrified. Similar but much more modern phenomena are not cnnknown here. Harvard and “Tech” students pre sometimes left stranded after buying many lobsters of a night, but they do not get petrified, of course. Millions of years after this particular lobster passed away the sporty young men of the stone age cracked its descendants with their flint hatchets and treated the stony show girls of that period. Indeed, some geologists claim that the term “lobster” as applied to sporty young men who do that sort of thing has descended from the stone age; they have been doing so since. The' petrified oyster is much more ancient than any ever found in a church stew. It also lived and breathed and had its troubles and joys 50,000,000 years ago. Prof. Shimer found it atop the Jura mountains in north Switzerland. How it got there only geologists can tell you; perhaps oysters carried alpenstocks in those days.