Fossils

What are fossils? Fossils are the remains of ancient animals or plants that died millions of years ago. In this post, you will learn everything you need to know about fossils.

Fossilisation

How are fossils formed? Fossils can only be formed in the perfect conditions, such as hot and dry conditions or muddy places. Fossilisation occurs when an animal or plant dies. In time, the animal's soft parts, such as the skin and organs, will rot and decay. Rarely, these parts will sometimes be fossilised. The body will be buried. Minerals will find their way inside the animal's bones, slowly turning it to stone. A plant's fossil will be an imprint in a rock. Fossilisation takes millions of years.

Missing pieces

Whenever a fossil skeleton is dug up, missing bones are very common. There are many ways that the bone could have been lost. A predator could have killed the animal in question and ripped a large piece of flesh off of it, taking bones with it. The bone could have been weathered away by erosion, or many other theories.

Whenever a bone is missing from a fossil skeleton, archeologists use other bones to reconstruct the missing bone. If one of the leg bones is missing, archeologists will use the other leg bone to make a "mirror image" to reconstruct the other leg bone.

Therefore, it is very rare for a complete skeleton to be found. Many species have been named based on a few shattered bones.

Different locations

A fossil is found on the top of a high mountain. A fossil of the same species is found deep in the ocean. How can you explain this? The answer is tectonic plates. All the continents are stationed on plates called tectonic plates. The plates drift very, very slowly around the Earth, taking the continents with them.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, all of Earth's land mass was gathered together into a huge supercontinent called Pangea. Ancient animals such as dinosaurs could travel over all the continents of the world. In time, Pangea split into two seperate supercontinents, called Gondwana and Laurasia. In time, these land masses split up even more until the continents we recognise today began to form.

Throughout all this, the bodies of dead animals were transported around the world. New oceans formed, and old ones vanished. In this way, you might see the fossils of land animals underwater and the fossils of sea creatures in tall cliffs far from the water. So if you see a sea creature's fossils in a high cliff, think, "There must have been an ocean here once".

That's all the main stuff about fossils that you need to know. I hope you enjoyed this post!