(January 7, 2017) Marine life traces, now fossil, emerges from the trenches of the Great War at the border between Italy and Austria. Researchers at the Department of Chemical and Geological Sciences of Unimore (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia), together with colleagues from the Ohio State University of Columbus and the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, published on Open Access Geologica Acta a paper called “Stars in the Silurian sky. A case study from the Carnic Alps, Austria”, to which professors from the University of Cagliari also collaborated. The studies, funded by FAR 2014 from Unimore, the United Nations International Geoscience Program and the National Science Foundation (USA), covered fossil remains of crinoids, distant ancestors of sea lilies, flower-like organisms with mouth and "petals" with which they captured the plankton and whose life flowed anchored to the sea bottom thanks to a star-shaped organ, from which the title of the published work, placed at the end of a long stalk. To add fascination to scientific discovery is the place of discovery of these fossilized remains: the Alps between Austria and Italy, within Cardiola Training, emerged in the excavation of a trench of the Great War, where 425 million years the water that ran the crinoids was flowing and where, long ago, just a century ago, the trenches of the First World War were placed. To share studies nowadays are researchers from nationality who were then on the opposite side of the barricade. (Red)

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"The interest for crinoids - explained Professor Annalisa Ferretti, Unimore Professor and first author of the article - is not only to be explained as a general interest in the evolution of the Planet. Crinoids have lived for millions of years, through climate change, to evolve into the sea lilies we know today, so the attention from them is born from the need to study their exceptional survival capacity under different conditions in time. The same places that have become sadly famous as death scene have turned out to be over 400 million years ago an unexpected cradle of life of puppies of fossil organisms. It was the time when the crinoids illuminated the deep abysses of the ancient ocean and life flowed fresh in the water; The same life that today, although slumbered from the gray of the rock that encloses them, is still able to reveal the arcane secrets of a forgotten time. "