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The 300 Million Year Old Wheel
- J.P. Robinson
- Oct 2, 2018
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 30, 2021
In 2008, a curious find was discovered down a coal mine in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk. As it could not be safely or successfully cut out due to the nature of the sandstone in which it was embedded, the mysterious artefact remains in situ down the mine. The following article is extracted from The Myth Of Man by J.P. Robinson.

Whilst drilling the coal coking stratum named J3 ‘Sukhodolsky’ at a depth of 900 metres from the surface, workers were surprised to find what appears to be the imprint of a wheel above them in the sandstone roof of the tunnel that they had just excavated.
Thankfully, photographs of the unusual imprint were taken by the Deputy Chief V.V. Kruzhilin, and shared with the mine foreman S. Kasatkin who brought news of the find to light. Without being able to further explore the site and inspect the imprint at close hand, we are left with only the photographs as evidence of their existence (there was more than one imprint) and the word of a group of Ukrainian miners.
Without being able to definitively date the strata in which the fossilized wheel print was found, it has been noted that the Rostov region surrounding Donetsk is situated upon Carboniferous rock aged between 360-300 million years ago, and the widely distributed coking coals have derived from the middle to late Carboniferous, suggesting a possible age of the imprint at around 300 million years old. This would mean that an actual wheel became stuck millions of years ago and dissolved over time due to a process called diagenisis, where sediments are lithified into sedimentary rocks, as is common with fossil remains.

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