[Rockhounds] Long-lost fragment of Stonehenge reveals rock grains dating to nearly 2 billion years ago

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

A long-lost piece of *Stonehenge*
<https://www.livescience.com/22427-stonehenge-facts.html> that was taken by
a man performing restoration work on the monument has been returned after
60 years, giving scientists a chance to peer inside a pillar of the iconic
monument for the first time.

In 1958, Robert Phillips, a representative of the drilling company helping
to restore Stonehenge, took the cylindrical core after it was drilled from
one of Stonehenge's pillars — Stone 58. Later, when he emigrated to the
United States, Phillips took the core with him. Because of Stonehenge's
protected status, it's no longer possible to extract samples from the
stones. But with *the core's return*
<https://www.livescience.com/65445-missing-piece-of-stonehenge-returned.html>
in
2018, researchers had the opportunity to perform unprecedented geochemical
analyses of a Stonehenge pillar, which they described in a new study.

They found that Stonehenge's towering standing stones, or sarsens, were
made of rock containing sediments that formed when *dinosaurs*
<https://www.livescience.com/3945-history-dinosaurs.html> walked the Earth.
Other grains in the rock date as far back as 1.6 billion years.

https://www.livescience.com/amp/stonehenge-pillars-mesozoic.html