EES 1030 Lecture 16: 16
11 May 2017
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Definition of a fossil: any remain, trace, or imprint of a plant or animal that has been preserved from some past geologic or prehistoric time. So anything that died before we started writing things down, or died and left some kind of trace or track. What we will talk about today: what is a fossil, taphonomy: fossil afterlife, modes of preservation, lagerst tten. Disarticulation (the breaking of the skeleton into multiple pieces) is a huge issue for organisms with multi-element skeletons. How we study information loss and the processes that occur from biocenosis to curated collection: This is one of the worst smelling fields, because we are attempting to intensively study decay processes and associated changes to fossil material. Aktuopaleontology attempts to reconstruct taphonomic processes using live or recently dead organisms. A cool aktuopaleontology/taphonomic experiment: sseti (shelf and slope experimental taphonomy inititative): A long-term experiment on the fate of organism"s remains at the sediment-water interface .
