Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Fossil collecting (sometimes, in a non-scientific sense, fossil hunting) is the collection of fossils for scientific study, hobby, or profit. Fossil collecting, as practiced by amateurs, is the predecessor of modern paleontology and many still collect fossils and study fossils as amateurs.
A living fossil is an extant taxon that phenotypically resembles related species known only from the fossil record. To be considered a living fossil, the fossil species must be old relative to the time of origin of the extant clade. Living fossils commonly are of species-poor lineages, but they need not be.
Indigenous fossil legends also frequently show motifs resembling major themes in scientific paleontology like deep time, extinction, change over time and relationships between different life forms. [3] Fossils have been used by Native Americans for evidence about the past, healing, personal protection, and trade. [4]
Fossils of organisms' bodies are usually the most informative type of evidence. The most common types are wood, bones, and shells. [57] Fossilisation is a rare event, and most fossils are destroyed by erosion or metamorphism before they can be observed. Hence the fossil record is very incomplete, increasingly so further back in time.
However, the first major fossil discovery to attract the attention of formally trained scientists were the Ice Age fossils of Kentucky's Big Bone Lick. [58] These fossils were studied by eminent intellectuals like France's George Cuvier and local statesmen and frontiersman like Daniel Boone , [ 59 ] Benjamin Franklin , [ 60 ] William Henry ...
Bust of the paleontologist Georges Cuvier (left) and a cast skeleton of Palaeotherium magnum (named by Cuvier in 1804, right), Cuvier Museum of Montbéliard. Paleontology (/ ˌ p eɪ l i ɒ n ˈ t ɒ l ə dʒ i, ˌ p æ l i-,-ən-/ PAY-lee-on-TOL-ə-jee, PAL-ee-, -ən-), also spelled palaeontology or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to the start of the ...
Most fossils that have been silicified are bacteria, algae, [3] and other plant life. Silicification is the most common type of permineralization. Silicification is the most common type of permineralization.
Paleontologists at work at the dinosaur site of Lo Hueco (Cuenca, Spain). Vertebrate paleontology is the subfield of paleontology that seeks to discover, through the study of fossilized remains, the behavior, reproduction and appearance of extinct vertebrates (animals with vertebrae and their descendants).