Museum Grade "Brain" Stromatolite - A lovely museum cabinet display piece of one of the Earth's oldest life forms.

Stromatolite is fossilized algae colonies, identified as some of the oldest, and longest continually surviving forms of life on Earth. There are stromatolites that have been dated to an astonishing 3.2 billion years ago (living while the Earth may have been still under frequent bombardment by asteroids), and there are still living colonies of the same algae today along certain shallow-water coasts.

This beautiful museum cabinet display piece is Wyoming stromatolite, aged about 400 million years, which shows the characteristic botryoidal structure (lumpy - like a bunch of grapes, or a "brain" -like structuring) of the outer surface of the ancient colony. Other edges show the layered structure created by layer after layer of algal mat growth.

The specimen is 8 inches long and 4 1/2 high and 5 inches wide. It weighs 6.8 lbs.