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Fossils Vocab
About fossils
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Fossil | Remains of plant, animals, and other organisms from the past. |
| Where are fossils found | Sedimentary rock layers |
| What are the sizes of fossils? | Can be as small as bacteria or as giant as a dinosaur. |
| Paleontology | The study of fossils |
| Formed - Sedimentary rocks | Layers by the deposition weathered rocks, sediments are pressed and cemented together. |
| Sedimentary rocks - how are fossils found here | Sedimentary rocks form at low temperatures and pressure. |
| Sedimentary rocks - Fossils and the rock layers. | In which they are found are approximately the same age. |
| Ammonites | Marine animal with a coiled external shell. |
| Stromatolites | Rock like structures built by blue-green algae. |
| Index Fossils | Indicate to geologist the boundaries in geological time. |
| First forms of life on Earth | Stromatolites, oldest know fossils (3.5 b.y.) |
| Stromatolites - Found | Still found in some remote areas of the world today. |
| Casts | Organism dies and the cavity fills with minerals, maybe sand or clay. |
| Mold | Organism dies and there is no filling of the cavity with minerals. |
| Index Fossils - what | A tool to determine the age of rocks. |
| Index Fossils, characteristics. | Easily recognizable, abundant, wide geographic distribution, lived a short period of geological time. |
| Trace Fossils | Provides indirect evidence of life in the past rather than the body of the animal itself. |
| Trace fossils evidence | Footprints, tracks, burrows, feces, borings. |
| Relative Age - what | If two different rock strata in different areas on Earth contain the same index fossil, then the strata are probably the same age. |
| Index Fossils used | To correlate the age of the rock strata. |
| Absolute Age | Most accurate form of dating, also called radiometric dating. |
| Absolute Age - uses | The decay of radioactive elements to find the absolute age of a rock or fossil. |
| Absolute Age - relies on | The property of half life, which is the predictable time an element takes to decay. |
| Geological Time Scale | A chronological representation of Earth’s geologic history going back 4.6 billion years until present day. |
| Fossil Record | History of life as documented by fossils. |
| Fossil Record - Tells us | Tells us when organisms lived and how they changed over millions of years (evolved). |
| Fossil Record - can give us | A clue as to the environment at that time. |
| Fossil Record: Recorded? | On the Geological Time Scale. |
| Coprolite | Fossilized poop. |
| Permineralization-how | Groundwater carries dissolved minerals into the pores and cavities of bone, wood, or shells. |
| Permineralization - what | The original material is preserved rather than replaced. |
| Permineralization - preserved | Bones, teeth, and shells can be preserved this way. |
| Petrification - two types | Replacement and Permineralization |
| Petrification - both result in? | Both result in organic material converting into stone or a similar substance. |
| Petrification - most well know example of the process | Petrified wood |
| Law of Superposition | Scientists can say that the newer rocks are at the top and the older rocks are farther to the bottom. |
| Carbonization | The process by which all substances of plants and animals decay, except carbon. |
| Carbonization - does what | This leaves a carbon film on the sedimentary rock |
| Carbonization - occurs | This process particularly occurs in plants and fish. |
| Burrows | Example of a trace fossil. Hole or tunnel in the ground. |
| Paleontologist | They look for fossils. and study them. |
| Fossil Resin | Resin is excreted from certain plants, which is thought to protect them from insects and seals off plant injuries. |
| Fossil Resin - does what | The sticky resin captures insects and other invertebrates. It hardens and they are preserved in the resin including their DNA. |
| Fossil Resin - know as what? | Amber because of its color. |
| Replacement | Water dissolves the original solid material and replaces them with mineral matter such as calcite, silica, pyrite and hematite. |
| Replacement - happens how? | Slowly |
| Replacement - what can be fossilized this way? | Bones, shells, and wood. |
| Tar, how | An animal can become trapped in tar and the whole body can be preserved. |
| Example of Tar | An example is the La Brea Tart Pits L.A. |
| Ice | Freezing can also trap whole animals. Mammoth’s bodies have been found with skin, hair and even organs. |
| Environment | Fossils can tell us something about the environment at the time the organism died. |
| Environment - how | Many times marine fossils are found on mountain tops. When continental plates collide, it causes uplift. |
| Environment - what | Finding buried marine fossils suggests the rock layers were once covered by water. |
| Environment - supports | The Theory of Continental Drift. |
| Environment - supports how | Fossils of the same plants and animals were found on different continents now separated by oceans. |
| Environment - supporting how | These organisms had no way of traveling those distances. Concluding that the continents were once one supercontinent. |
| Bacteria | Found fossil impressions. |
| Fossilization to occur | Preserved close to after it dies so the tissue doesn't decay. |
| Fossil - Latin | To dig |
| Paleontology | Science of very old existing things. |
| Permineralization. | Died in wetland, buried under layers of sediment, compresses the tissue, the tissue is replaced with minerals from the water coming through the sediment.. |
| Cast and Mold | Minerals dissolves the tissue and creates a mold. The mold fills with with sediment and recreates the shape of the remains. |
| Inclusion fossil | Amber and tar pits example |
| False fossils Pseudofossils | Rock formations that look like fossils but aren't. |
| Fossils too small to see by the human eye | Microfossils |
| Fossils where to be found | highways, coalmines, sandstone, limestone. When petroleom is drilled. |
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