alt Hacker NewsSt. Stephens cathedral in Vienna was built with sandstone that contains seashells. It's hundreds of kilometers away from the shore, but ~15 million years ago the area where it stands now was a seabed.
The stones are not from the exact location where it was built, but from close by. The quarry where the stones came from hundreds of years ago is still active, and you can find tons of fossils there. It's practically impossible to get a piece of rock from there without visible seashells.
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PaulDavisThe1st • today at 5:02 AM
Not Vienna or Europe, but N. America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interior_Seaway
thrownthatway • today at 12:16 AM
Was the land lower, the seas higher, or some combination, way back when?
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Almost any surface on earth was once under the water. You can find sea shells and various sea deposits high on some 8000m peaks or 1000kms inland.
Everybody who cares at least slightly knows this, and I am pretty sure author knows this too, he could have spared us the initial hyperbole. Analysis itself is good but not everything needs to read like dramatic novel.