Mummies, they're called, these strange shapes that form one of the largest structures that ever existed on Earth. Stretching some 2,900 kilometers from Spain to Romania, the long, sinuous curve of millions of mummies-once-living, vase-shaped animals-is a fossil reef. In its heyday in the Jurassic, the reef dwarfed today's Great Barrier Reef on Australia's northeast coast. Now visible only in outcrops dotted across a vast area of central and southern Spain, southwest Germany, central Poland, southeastern France, Switzerland, and eastern Romania near the Black Sea, the ancient reef was made up not of corals, but of deep-sea sponges called hexactinellids.
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