fossils

Uncharted Waters (all about the big picture. No animal lives on a blank sheet of paper)

| Patricia Bujard

Let’s revisit our friend Mr. B from the first post of this series on fossilization (Who’s Mr. B?  Refresh your memory here).  We’ve dug up his bones, put them together, figured out all the soft stuff like muscle and skin, and we’ve got a pretty good idea how he lived…but he didn’t live all by himself on a desert island, or on a blank white sheet of paper (ahem, I’m looking at you, boring sideways diagrams).

 

So how do we figure out about the big picture?  Where does Mr. B fit in?

 

First let’s take a look at old Mr. B…what do we know about him?

  • We know he’s a Brachiosaurus.
  • We found it in Colorado while digging at the Morrison Formation.
  • He’s a very large mega-herbivore, and rare in this particular formation.

This isn’t a lot to go on, aside from the fact that Mr. B would need plenty of plants to eat and water to drink, and lots of space to roam.

 

Who’s in the neighborhood? It would be tough to figure out what makes a Savannah with only a giraffe to look at, so let’s take a look at some of Mr. B’s neighbors.     

 

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Middle plant munchers.jpg minimuchers.jpg

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  • There were also all sorts of other non-dino critters, like flying pterosaurs, several small land and water-loving crocs, all sorts of insects (including termites that built 90ft-tall mounds), fish, frogs, turtles, lizards, crayfish, clams, and even a few egg-laying mammals no bigger than rats.

Now we’re getting somewhere.  We know that this environment has to support several very large herbivores and carnivores, along with a very diverse population of smaller dinosaurs and other animals.  We’ll have to assume that many small and delicate animals were not preserved.

What we can’t really figure out from looking at all these animals is…what where all those giant plant eaters eating?

 

The Green Stuff.  Of course, plants are essential to any ecosystem, and in the Morrison Formation we find stuff kinda like this…

Conifers:

Cypress_Three02
A giant cypress tree in the Tassili n’Ajjer National Park, at the edge of the Saharan desert. Image courtesy of archmillenium.net
A conifer tree, probably a type of juniper.
Ponderosa pine trees. These are in the middle of the desert in the southwestern states of the US.
A pinyon pine. Pine nuts would be a tasty treat for any dino I’m sure. 🙂 Images courtesy of in-the-desert.com

 

Ginkgoes:

A reconstruction of a Jurassic ginkgo branch. Image courtesy of Wang Chen
A modern day Ginkgo biloba tree. Wikipedia commons.

Tree Ferns:

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Doesn’t it make you feel like you’ve stepped into a time machine?  These tree ferns are at the Whirinaki Forest Park in New Zealand.  New Zealand is just plain awesome, they should’ve stuck a couple of these in Jurassic Park…image courtesy of fotoditzi (2007)

Cycads:

These cycads are grown in a garden, but wild cycads tend to grow in large thickets. They depend on being close to each to reproduce.
There are many more varied shapes to cycads. these are just the most drought tolerant, but all cycads tend to do well in places that are hot and dry like Arizona.
Others prefer wetter climates. Click “cycads” above to see more varieties in this person’s garden. Images courtesy of troydonovan, on growingontheedge.net
Photo courtesy of Maurice Levin (2011)

Horsetails can live just about anywhere so long as there’s a river- even deserts.

These horsetails were photographed in the Chihuahuan Desert Gardens, Centennial Museum. Images courtesy of A. H. Harris

Ferns in the desert!  Notice how grass-like the “dead” one looks.

These images are courtesy of Aneyefortexas.wordpress.com
Some ferns don’t even look like ferns!
This one looks dead, but will freshen up into a lovely green again as soon as the rains come. You can see more beautiful pictures like these by clicking the link to desert ferns above. Images courtesy of Aneyefortexas.wordpress.com

 

Dirt isn’t just dirt.  Sand, mud, ash, sediment at the bottom of the ocean or a lake…they all turn into different kinds of rock.  So what kind of rock a fossil is buried in can tell us a lot about plants, which can then tell us a lot about the local weather.

The Morrison Formation is made of layers of mudstone, sandstone, siltstone and limestone, and is light grey, greenish gray, or red in color. Most of the fossils occur in the green siltstone beds and lower sandstones.

To translate into plain English, this means that the area was an area laced with a few rivers, and had seasons of drought and flood.  Since the area was relatively flat, it would flood and turn into swamp in the wet season, but have dry Savannah during the dry season.

But there was no grass or flowering plants in the Jurassic, so what sort of plants would there be in a Mesozoic Savannah?

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A typical Savannah in the present day.

 

Take a look at modern ecosystems.  In areas that have no grass or flowering plants, what is the primary groundcover?

Let’s take another look at those desert ferns…

 

 

Dead looking and dry during the long months of drought, but give it a little water and it transforms.  The grassy-looking brown fern further up does the same thing.  Dead and brown when it’s dry, lush and green when it rains.

 

SoilCrust_landscape
Photo courtesy of Neal Herbert

Another ground cover…biological soil crust.

Biological what?  (my thoughts when I first read that)

Biological soil crust, or cryptobiotic soil, is a community of bacteria, moss, and lichen that holds moisture, prevents erosion, and provides valuable nutrients for plants (and possibly dinos 😀 ).  It looks all brown and crusty during the dry season, but like the ferns, turns green when it rains.

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What looks like rocky soil are actually living communities of bacteria, lichens, mosses, and algae.  Photo courtesy of NPS.gov

One last picture, and here we have something that is probably very similar to what the Jurassic Morrison habitat was like.  Only instead of the flowering shrubs we see here, imagine many different shapes of cycad and bushy areas of dried out ferns waiting for rain…closer to the river we get horsetails, ginkgoes, and giant, more water-loving ferns and tree ferns.

The padded feet of dinosaurs, like camels, kangaroos, and ostriches today, doesn’t break the slow-growing crust underfoot.

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That trail you see cutting through the crust shows us how thick the living layer can be.  The trail is the result of a mountain bike or something cutting through it, which will take hundreds of years to grow back.

 

Quick Question: Now that we have a more complete picture, how do you think Mr. B fits in now?  My guess is as good as yours, so it’s all fun speculation.  I’d love to here your answer in the comments!   🙂

Fleshing out the Bones Series:

Time to Get Wild! (how we can guess about behavior, and how crazy it can get!)

| Patricia Bujard

Now we’ve put all the pieces together and figured out what they mean (sort of).  We’ve done our best to cloth the muscle and bone with fatty tissue, skin, and maybe even feathers.  Now we can really get wild.

 

But surely there’s no way to have any clues on behavior?  It’s all just guesswork right?

Well no, fossils can leave behind clues even for how an animal lived.  Here are a few ways we can speculate (or make an educated guess based on fossil evidence) how wild these critters could get. 🙂

 

Bones & Teeth             

  • Teeth can tell us a lot about what an animal ate, and the rest of the skeleton can give clues as to how it ate.  For example: the slender, notched jaw of Dilophosaurus suggests that it usually ate fast, slippery prey.
Image courtesy of Jaime A. Headden (2011).  Check out his blog to see more beautiful diagrams & illustrations, or if you want to look up more detailed info on all things paleontology. 🙂  Qilong.wordpress.com
  • It’s not fool proof though, just look at pandas and fruit bats.
A replica of a fruit bat skull, also known as the flying fox. Image courtesy of skullsunlimited.com
Just look at those chompers! Image not mine, so if you know who to credit please let me know.

 

  • Sometimes an animal that looks specialized in one thing is just specialized to survive during hard times. Example: seals that have teeth “specialized” for eating krill don’t only eat krill.  They eat everything they can get their teeth on, with the added bonus of pigging out on krill when they can, just because they can.

 

Articulated Skeletons      

  • Sometimes animals are buried suddenly and quickly.  In especially rare cases, these complete skeletons preserve “candid shots”, moments frozen in time by a collapsing sand dune, mudslide, or drifting down into a deep, cold lake.
  • Click on the pictures for more info. 🙂

 

Citipati fossil on eggs. Photo courtesy of Nature (December 1995)
Reconstruction of Citipati by Apsaravis.deviantart.com
Reconstructed Citipati fossil. Credit unknown, so please let me know
Velociraptor vs. Protoceratops (sheep-sized cousin of Triceratops)
I couldn’t find who to properly credit for these images, so please let me know. Thank you.

 

Track Ways                                 

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Photo courtesy of R. T. Bird
  • There are many more tracks than bones, and they offer a unique look at prehistoric animals in action.  Here are a few things we can learn from tracks…
    • How they moved
    • How fast they moved
    • How different animals interact (like traveling herds, or pursuit of prey)
    • Swimming pterosaurs!  There are many tracks of the flying critters swimming.  Interestingly enough, the tracks only have back paw prints.
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Image courtesy of Witton 2013

 

Other Trace Fossils        

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Wikipedia commons

 

  • Fossil dino poo is even better at telling us what a dino ate than its teeth.  The only problem is figuring out who it came from (unless you have a fossil of an animal mid-poop!)
pterosaur_henderson_4090
This little Pterosaur drifted to the bottom of a very deep lake. If you follow the spine with your eyes to just below the blobby rib cage at the base of the tail, there’s a tiny shadow that looks like a cucumber shape. This critter was fossilized mid potty-break. Image courtesy of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology.
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Here’s a closer image. The little arrows labeled cp are pointing to the coprolite, or fossil poo. 🙂 Image courtesy of Hone et al. (2015)
  • Dino burrows give great insight into the social nesting behavior of some dinos.
  • Nests, teeth marks on bones, and dino bottom prints (true story) are all great clues left behind by living prehistoric animals.  Put together, they offer a glimpse into the animal’s story.

 

Modern Family             

  • Since crocs are living relatives of dinosaurs, and birds are dinosaurs, then they are a great place to look for clues.  Take a closer look, and we may get a glimpse of exactly how strange, beautiful, and wonderful dinosaurs could be.
  • The croc family may look tough and mean, but here are a couple of normal behaviors that show how gentle and social they can be.

 

  • Here are a few funky bird dances.  Bright colors not required. 😉

 

Quick Question: Which was your favorite dancing bird? How do you think looking at modern animals like these can inspire our vision of prehistoric animals?  I’d love to hear from you in the comments! 🙂

 

Fleshing out the Bones Series:

Let’s Put Some Skin on That (how much we know, and don’t know, about the soft stuff)

| Patricia Bujard

Now here’s where things get a little muddy.  Bones are easy.  They’re hard, relatively common, and all bones that look about the same are going to have similar functions.  Back-boned critters all kinda have the same basic pattern.  Same with muscle.  The only squishy thing with muscle is determining how much is where, then you can figure out the basic shape on top of the bones.

 

But what about skin?  We’re pretty good at figuring out how a dinosaur works on the inside, but what did they look like on the outside?

Here is where a little mud or volcanic ash comes in handy.

When an animal is buried in soft, fine-grained sediment, then the critter’s skin, scales, fur, or feathers leave an impression.  Just like stamping into soft clay.  With more refined techniques in recovering fossils in the field (or prepping them at the museum), paleontologists are finding more “skin stamps” than ever before.

 

Corythosaurus casuarius skeleton, by Barnum Brown, 1916.

A hadrosaur mummy.  Keep in mind that the animal was most likely dead and already decomposing when it was buried.  We can’t know for sure if it had more fat under the skin than showed here or not.  Notice how thick and muscular the tail base is. 🙂

Photo not mine.  If you know who needs credit, please let me know. 🙂

Corythosaurus skin.

Bell, 2012

More hadrosaur skin impressions.  The impressions that look like a honeycomb are actually impressions of what’s underneath the bumps.  Reminds me of bubble wrap. 😛

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Photo courtesy of Black Hills Institute of Geological Research

Triceratops skin impression.  No one knows if those larger osteoderms would look just as they do here, or if larger quills or spikes where attached.  Speaking of quills…

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wikipedia commons

A beautiful fossil of Psittacosaurus (distant, small cousin of Triceratops) at the Senckenberg Museum of Frankfurt.  We can’t be sure about color, but you can see the pattern of darker and lighter scales.  Notice how much muscle this critter has, and those quills!  A one-of-a-kind find.  Remember my post a couple weeks back about how hard it is for an animal to be fossilized?  How much more amazing that we have something like this?

Here’s a closer look at those quills…

high resolution images of Psittacosaurus tail quills, from the paper studying the specimen

The general consensus is that these quills are a feather-like integument. Here’s what we don’t know…

  • If all species of Psittacosaurus had them (there’s 18, all very different from each other), and if they did, how much & where.
  • If any other ceratopsians had them.  Psittacosaurus was part of a line that died out, so it’s rather unlikely that Triceratops & co. had them.

 

Now that we’re on the subject of feathers…just look at this exquisite fossil of archaeopteryx. 🙂 It never gets old…takes my breath away every time I see it.

Photo not mine.  If you know who needs credit, please let me know. 🙂

Archaeopteryx used to be famous for being the “first bird”, now we know that just about every smallish dinosaur (and even some big ones) where wearing similar outfits.  Yes, most carnivorous dinosaurs are known to have feathers, it’s just a question of what kind, and how much. 🙂

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Photo courtesy of Institute of Fossil Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing

I know that looks like fur, but those are fluffy feathers all over this little sinosauropteryx.  Notice the bands of light and dark color on its tail.

Here are some more birdy feathers on a larger dinosaur.

This is Zhenyu- Zhenya- Zen- Oh forget it.  Let’s just say she’s a cousin of those infamous raptors from Jurassic Park.  She’s about five feet long, so closer to the real turkey-sized Velociraptor.  Fully feathered.  Just look at those glorious wings!

Photo courtesy of Stephen Brusatte

Here’s a close up of those feathers.  Notice the full wing in photo D below.  You can clearly see primary, secondary, and covert feathers, just like what you’d see on a modern bird wing.

But wait, it gets better. 😀

Not quite as pretty, but look at figures A, B, and C below.  The bumps that those arrows are pointing to are called quill knobs, and figure D shows us what that means. 😀

Keep in mind that this fossil came from a critter called Dakotaraptor.  This guy was every bit as big as the ones in Jurassic Park.  And it has wings.

Image from paper studying Dakotaraptor.

A prettier reconstruction of Dakotaraptor’s wing.

Photo courtesy to Robert DePalma.

These and other fossils from even larger dinosaurs such as yutyrannus (T-rex’s Chinese cousin) that also preserve feathers, can give us clues for exactly how diverse and widespread feathers are in the dinosaur family tree.

 

The flying reptiles called pterosaurs, for example.

Picture not mine, if you know who needs credit, please let me know.

With fossils like these we can learn about the structure of the wing, and that these animals also had a fur-like coat of feathery fuzz covering their bodies.  No scaly or naked skin here.

 

So there is a lot we do know, but still so much left in the dark.  With bones, muscles, and a few hints of soft tissue, next time we’ll be heading off into uncharted waters.

 

Quick Question: These fossils are all amazing, but there is still so much we don’t know.  Take a quick look at the lion and tiger above, and then look at the skulls below.  Can you tell which one is which?  Leave your answer in the comments, I’d love to hear from you! 🙂

These are replicas from skullsunlimited.com, but they get the point across 🙂

 

Fleshing out the Bones Series:

Here’s the Easy Part (figuring out muscle and other fun anatomy)

| Patricia Bujard

They say the dead tell no tales…Obviously whoever coined that phrase never studied the bones of prehistoric animals, because the fossils of dead critters sure say a lot.  Dry bones all kinda look the same, but take a closer look and you can see the clues left behind.

 

Last Monday, we went through a basic rundown on how paleontologists can figure out how to put the bones together.  How they take the bits and pieces they find in the field and build up the skeletons you see in museums.  Now before we move on to the soft stuff I just want to make one thing clear.

Unless it’s something totally new, most dinosaurs don’t have as much guesswork as I implied in my post.

Take Allosaurus, for example.  Tons of bones, from many different animals, gives us a good overall picture of the species and its growth cycle.  So for many dinosaurs, the difference from one skeleton to another is pretty small for the average enthusiast like myself.  And honestly, the skeletons of lions and tigers are almost identical.  We wouldn’t have a clue how obviously different they are without everything on top of the bones.

But I’m getting ahead of myself now.  We’ll come back to the lion and tiger example next Monday. 🙂

So what can bones tell us about an animal?

  • A skull can tell us about how the animal sensed the world around it.  The size and shape of its brain, how good its sense of smell, if it had binocular vision like we do…all that good stuff.
  • Teeth and special adaptations in the skull can give us clues to diet and wacky feeding habits.  Take a quick look at woodpecker skulls and you’ll see what I mean. 🙂
  • The shape of the joints, and points of muscle attachment, can show us how the animal might’ve moved.  It also gives us a basic silhouette to work with.
  • Bumps on the forearm, called “quill knobs”, show where large feathers where attached.  As well as other marks of soft tissue like where crests might attach.

 

These are just a few things bones can tell us, and how can we know this?

Take a close look the next time you eat a chicken drumstick or turkey leg.  The bone is not perfectly smooth, and it has a very specific shape.  There are ridges, bumps, little divets on one side…these are all marks where the muscles and tendons attached.

The chicken drumstick is actually a great example, because the bones of birds and crocodilians can be a sort of Rosetta Stone for translating dino bones.  Birds and crocs are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, and birds are now classified as a group within dinosauria.

Long story short, the bones of living relatives like birds and crocs are a good starting point for figuring out dinosaur anatomy.  Not perfect, since crocs aren’t dinos, and modern birds fit into a specific niche inside the huge and diverse group of animals we call dinosaurs.  But crocs and birds can help fill in a few places that we would otherwise be clueless about.

  • How much muscle?  Crocs and birds have a different structure to their muscles than mammals.
  • So we know the shape and size of the critter’s brain, but what does that mean?  Crocs and birds today can give us clues.
  • Other soft bits like organs, and how dinos metabolisms worked…looking at birds and crocs can help figure out mysteries in the bones, like how dinosaurs got so big.

But now we’re heading into squishier territory than even muscles.  Bones are pretty solid (for the most part).  Muscles and soft tissue directly attached to the bone is just a matter of translating the markings correctly…but next Monday we’ll dip our toes into the mud and find out how much we know, or don’t know, about the soft outsides.

 

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Quick Question: Take a moment to notice all the little bumps, ridges, and dimples in this skull.  Notice that triangular dip at the back of the lower jaw, and the high ridges that make that triangle shape.  Powerful muscles to close the jaw attach here and go through that “loop”, where they attach to the back of the neck and head. This is one powerful critter!  Can you guess what it is?  

Hint: those teeth will tell you it’s not a dinosaur or reptile. 😉 I’d love to hear your answer in the comments! 🙂

Fleshing out the Bones Series:

Critter of the Week: Pliosaurus

| Patricia Bujard

Meet Tigger. This big guy is always ready to flash a big, toothy smile, especially at mealtime.

 

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Tigger sure has a big appetite.  He’ll eat anything that fits in that giant mouth of his.  Don’t mind the teeth though, because he’s just a big softie.

Speaking of teeth, I’ve made a few changes to his smile.  I’d originally chosen Liopleurodon, the marine predator famous in Walking With Dinosaurs, as the critter for Tigger.  But I decided to change it to Pliosaurus for a few reasons.

  1. Pliosaurus is the pliosaur!  It was the original critter discovered that gave the whole group its name
  2. Pliosaurus doesn’t seem to be as well represented as Liopleurodon, probably because of Walking With Dinosaurs.  
  3. Pliosaurus is easier to spell and say than Liopleurodon.  I have to sound out that name in my head every time I write it. 😛 Kids are awesome at saying long dino names like a boss, but come on, that one is just plain hard unless you’ve heard it. *cough*Walking With Dinosaurs*cough*

What’s the difference between this picture and the last one?

I’m glad you asked, because here’s where I get to geek out on you. 😀  But first, a quick disclaimer.

I don’t pretend to be an expert, because I’m not.  I’m just a hardworking mom doing my best to make a scientifically accurate picture book based on prehistoric animals.  I’m just sharing what I learn in the process, so if you happen to be an expert, please let me know if I’ve got something wrong! I’d be happy to hear from someone more experienced. 🙂

Liopleurodon sketch.
Pliosaurus skull diagram, note the smooth, sloping forehead & shape of the lower mandible. I found this picture by searching the web, but don’t know who to credit. Any help there would be great, because I want to give proper credit to whoever illustrated this helpful diagram.
Pliosaurus sketch
Liopleurodon skull. Picture was found on Pleasiosauria.com, where credit is given to Markus Felix Bühler

Now, Top left picture is the original sketch, which is based on liopleurodon.  Compared to the bottom picture of the skull, now I see where I got the teeth wrong a bit.  Shows what happens when you use a toy for reference. A very well sculpted Wild Safari model, but still a toy. 🙂

Comparing both skull and sketch to the top right and middle pictures, you can see a few big differences.  You can really go into technical detail, but the basics are…

  • the slope of the forehead
  • the shape of the mandible, the bottom jaw.
  • the size and arrangement of the teeth.

So a casual glance looks like I didn’t change much, but a closer look shows a much different animal. 🙂

 

Making progress…

I just want to say thank you for stopping by to chit chat with me on my little corner of internet. 🙂

It truly is humbling (and awesome!) to know that I get visitors all the way from Spain and Indonesia.  I have no idea who came from where of course, so there’s no way I’d ever know where you live unless you wanted to share your address with me.  It’s just cool to see the little map and which countries are colored in. 😀  Isn’t technology amazing?

Thank you for taking the time to read.  Life is busy and time is irreplaceable, so I hope I’ve done what I can to make your stay enjoyable.

If there’s anything I can do to make things better around here, then I’d love to hear from you!  I know there isn’t a lot on the site so far, but what do you like best?  Why do you like it?  I’d love to hear your answer in the comments. 🙂 

 

Coming Next Week…

Two thrown in for the price of one this time around.  This pair are always happy to meet new friends. 🙂

Share your guess in the comments! They’ll be a couple of the critters over on the critter page. 🙂

The World’s Toughest Jigsaw Puzzle

| Patricia Bujard

A six-year-old walks down the hall, eyes wide as he stares open mouthed at the skeletons towering high above him.  Dagger teeth, gleaming claws, curving necks and long, sweeping tails…It’s almost surreal how the bones are suspended in the air, as if the skin around them was just invisible.

Of course, now I know about the armature of steel.  How each bone has it’s own pocket to nestle in.  If one bone needs cleaning or repairs, then there’s no need to take down the whole skeleton.  But how do we know what the skeletons looked like?

In the last post, we talked about how unlikely it is to find a complete skeleton, or even a mostly complete skeleton.  If you haven’t read it yet, then check it out, because it’s pretty amazing what happens between dead dinosaur and museum. 🙂

But kid’s books and movies always show the whole dinosaur under some random hill.  It’s gotten downright ridiculous, so that Bob the Builder and his team can dig into a hill, find a complete skeleton of a brontosaurus “standing” in the dirt, and then simply leave it there to be the entrance to their dinosaur themed amusement park.

Convenient.

articulated brachiosaur color copy.png
Every paleontologist’s dream.  Please excuse the ugly sloppiness.  I was practicing speed. 🙂

Truth is, building the complete skeleton is only the first part of figuring out just what these critters looked like.

It’s like the world’s toughest jigsaw puzzle, with a few minor complications…

  • No box with the picture to get a clue on what you’re building
  • No idea how many pieces there are supposed to be, just that there should be at least oh, 2,000 or so…right?  Just how many bones does your average dino have anyway?
  • After a summer spent combing the hills, maybe this is what you end up with…

fossil bits color.png

So what do you do?

Luckily, bones can tell you a lot, especially teeth.  An expert can tell you these are sauropod bones.  Even better, an expert can tell you these belong in the family brachiosauridae .

 

Now here comes the fun part…putting the puzzle together.

You look at all the other fossils in the family.  Maybe there are more of the same “genus”, brachiosaurus.  Maybe these bones are enough to tell which species of brachiosaurus you’re looking at, and you can look at those for reference.  And so on and so forth until you and your colleagues have determined what a complete skeleton of your brachiosaur might look like.

Of course, the whole process is a long, drawn out, very complicated business.  This is just my humble rundown. 🙂

Long story short- except in very few cases where paleontologists discover an articulated skeleton, like the lovely dilophosaurus here- then most skeletal reconstructions have at least a few missing parts, which are then filled in by educated guesses based on closely related animals.

wikipedia commons.

Now that you have all the pieces, how do they fit together?

Knowing where all the pieces go relies on reference to other skeletons, research, and a great deal of know-how on the bones themselves.

Bones can tell us a lot, because the soft and squishy bits that hold them together leave scars.  Knowing how to interpret these scars is where dry bones get interesting, because this is the beginning of figuring out how the animal looked in life.

Next post we’ll talk about muscles, tendons, and all the soft stuff under the skin that we don’t usually see in the museum.

Quick Question: Did you like to see fossil exhibits as a kid?  What impressed you the most about them?  I’d love to hear your answer in the comments! 🙂

 

Fleshing out the Bones Series:

The Miracle of Fossilization

| Patricia Bujard

Life is full of everyday miracles.  The sort of things that are so unlikely to happen, it’s amazing they happen at all.

 

Take fossils for example.  Let’s start with something big- a sauropod, or long-necked dinosaur.  Should be easy to fossilize right?

Unfortunately we need a dead one for our fossil, so let’s skip the sad story.

Let’s just say an old brachiosaurus (Let’s call him old Mr. B) came to the riverbank for one last drink of water…Now we have a very large feast for scavengers all up and down the riverbank.  They won’t have to worry about hunting for months!  Well, maybe weeks, depending on how many critters are joining the buffet.

Mr. B is not going to stay in one piece.  A leg over here…head gone…a chunk of tail in the belly of another…By the time the scavengers are done picking the bones clean, bits and pieces are going to be scattered and broken all over the riverbank.

That pile of bones bleaches in the sun for a few more months.  The bones dry out and turn brittle.  Insects and small, nocturnal mammals with ever-growing teeth gnaw on them.

The skies turn dark, storm clouds gather, and a week of constant rain raises the river.  More rain from the north rushes in, and in a few short hours, flood waters pour in strong enough to uproot trees and toss huge rocks as easily as pebbles.

The rush of water and debris lifts the heavy bones and carries them downriver.  A few ribs catch on the roots of a thick, strong tree, but the other bones are torn free and get carried on.  A leg bone settles in a small undercurrent and sinks into a deeper spot in the river.  The rest of the bones get carried on…

On and on, the skeleton is fragmented by the force of the water.

Silt- dirt and debris carried by the current- covers the bones.

Over time, enough layers of silt build up and are flattened by the layers above them.  Water, pressure, and time cement the layers of silt into sedimentary rock like sandstone and mudstone.

Water seeps down through the rock.  Bone is porous, and so water can seep through it.  The water leaves mineral deposits behind, like the hard water deposits that build up in the dishwasher.

Like a sponge drenched in salt water and left to dry in the sun, the bones slowly harden like solid rock.

But that’s not all.  It’s not enough to be fossilized.  The rock needs to stay intact.

The earth is constantly moving.  Rocks that hold fossils can be pushed down and melted in Earth’s liquid mantle.  Or pushed up into mountains, only to be erased by wind and rain.

As if that wasn’t enough, we have to find these fossils.  Exposed fossil bone erodes quickly in the face of wind, rain, and sun.  Scientists usually have good ideas where to find fossils based on previous discoveries, but many times it’s the kid playing by the bluff who finds them.  Or the hiker who sees that spot in the rock that doesn’t look like the rest…

Even when the fossil is found, it can be lost, destroyed, or stolen.

archaeopteryx fossil

My point here is, it’s amazing we have any fossils at all!  More amazing still, the exquisite beauty of fossils like the Lagerstatten of Germany and places like it.  Just look at the archaeopteryx at the top of the paragraph here (those feathers are so perfect, they look better than my chickens’ feathers!).

I am truly humbled to think about the beauty of the world around us, of humanity, of life.  That it’s possible to see remnants of creatures gone for millions of years.  That we can even dream of what they might have looked like.

I look at a fossil like this, and I see a miracle.  And then I look at the world today, see the people in my life…or even just take a moment to watch my hands and the way they move as I type these words…the complexity behind the mechanics of their movement.

An everyday miracle. 🙂

Fleshing Out the Bones Series: