It often fills cracks and fissures in the rock.
The great interest in connexion with a dwarf West African race of elephant is in relation to the fossil pigmy elephants of the limestone fissures and caves of Malta and Cyprus.
The deposits near Caylus and in Quercy occupy fissures and pockets in Jurassic limestone, and have yielded a remarkable assemblage of the relics of Tertiary mammals and other fossils.
In Scandinavia a thick turpentine oozes from cracks or fissures in the bark, forming by its congelation a fine yellow resin, known commercially as "spruce rosin," or "frankincense"; it is also procured artificially by cutting off the ends of the lower branches, when it slowly exudes from the extremities.
Minute cracks are sometimes produced by the contraction; they are often more or less straight, but in other cases a very perfect system of rounded fissures arises.