Is this really a 300 million-year-old machine gear?

A man in Russia has discovered a piece of coal in the Chernogorodskiy mines that contains what appears to be the remains of a machine that is 300 million years old. Could it be an ancient space ship or evidence of an intelligent species that once shared the planet with Dimetrodon? According to The Voice of Russia, the coal was formed 300 million years ago, which is why scientists believe the item inside dates back to that era too:



The last property of the object that puzzled the scientists was its distinctive shape which was reminiscent of a modern tooth-wheel. It is hard to imagine that an object could take regular shape of a tooth-wheel with six identical ‘teeth' naturally. Moreover, the intervals between the ‘teeth' of the gear are curiously large in relation to the size of the ‘teeth' themselves which might mean that the detail was a part of a complicated mechanism. Nowadays, such ‘spare parts' are used in construction of microscopes and other mechanical appliances. This poses yet another unanswerable question to the modern scientists: how can the metal tooth-wheel be 300 million years old if the regular-shaped ‘wheel' itself was created by man millions of years later.

Read more of the insanity on The Voice of Russia.