trovant

plural trovants

1. A type of bulbous stone formation found in Romania, sometimes called a "living stone" or "living rock" because they are popularly believed to slowly grow, and to reproduce when pieces break off and become new concretions; whether they actually grow in size over time, and/or are concretions, is disputed.

   The Cochirleni formation is mainly made of sands and quartzous sandstones, richly glauconitic, generally shaly, with trovants; the typical section lies in the Danube's cliff, from the Hinog Valley towards the south up to Cochirleni and on the Pestera-Cochirleni Valley up to Ivrinezu Mic.

   2015, Carmen Maftei, Extreme Weather and Impacts of Climate Change on Water Resources, page 103

   2 more examples

   Trovants: the "living" stones of Romania formed as high porosity spherical sandstone concretions developed around a fossil. […] The trovant geological reservation at Costești, Romania, hold[s] a large and diverse in size and shape collection of trovants embedded in alluvial strata. A new 3D images of a small-size cm size trovant (a) were acquired using a[…]

   2023 April 13, Ezequiel F. Médici, Alejandro D. Otero, Album of Porous Media: Structure and Dynamics, Springer Nature, →ISBN, page 36

   The concrete substance tends to keep the stones roundish, but if it bubbles off to one side for any number of reasons, the sidebubble can get too heavy and fall off - which seems to be how trovants "reproduce." The word "trovant” is a boiled-down German word that means “cemented sand.” The word is relatively new; geologists believe that the first trovants were created some 5 million years ago, during the Middle Miocene era.

   2024 September 24, Terri Schlichenmeyer, The Book of Facts and Trivia: Science, Visible Ink Press, →ISBN