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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.
Index fossils must have a short vertical range, wide geographic distribution and rapid evolutionary trends. Another term, "zone fossil", is used when the fossil has all the characters stated above except wide geographical distribution; thus, they correlate the surrounding rock to a biozone rather than a specific time period.
Fossil collecting (sometimes, in a non-scientific sense, fossil hunting) is the collection of the 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. Professionals and amateurs alike collect fossils ...
Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote of "tongue stones", which he called glossopetra. These were fossil shark teeth, thought by some classical cultures to look like the tongues of people or snakes. [17] He also wrote about the horns of Ammon, which are fossil ammonites, whence the group of shelled octopus-cousins ultimately draws its modern name.
The name of the park gives it away: Most of the fossils you'll see at Petrified Forest are of exquisite petrified wood from the Triassic period over 200 million years ago.
Paleobotany, also spelled as palaeobotany, is the branch of botany dealing with the recovery and identification of plant remains from geological contexts, and their use for the biological reconstruction of past environments (paleogeography), and the evolutionary history of plants, with a bearing upon the evolution of life in general.
A slightly different framework for natural history, covering a similar range of themes, is also implied in the scope of work encompassed by many leading natural history museums, which often include elements of anthropology, geology, paleontology, and astronomy along with botany and zoology, [15] [16] or include both cultural and natural ...
Tree remains that have undergone petrifaction, as seen in Petrified Forest National Park. In geology, petrifaction or petrification (from Ancient Greek πέτρα (pétra) 'rock, stone') is the process by which organic material becomes a fossil through the replacement of the original material and the filling of the original pore spaces with minerals.