Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
Sometimes tissues can fossilize very quickly. This preserves soft tissues to an amazing degree:
Surprise! Fossils in a flash
Scientists sometimes make the error of a hasty generalization. It was thought that one cannot preserve organs, but with the help of specific bacteria the impossible becomes possible.
"In rock after rock, Martill didn’t just find a skeleton of the fish. He also found its organs petrified in stone. He found the stomach, intestines and the delicate feather-like gills that the fish used to breathe. In the stomach of one fish, Martill even found the petrified remains of its last meal: the bodies of shrimpy creatures called ostracods. And when he looked closely at the fossil gills under a microscope, he realized that even individual cells had been preserved."
Just a teaser, it goes into how they discovered it was a bacteria that made this possible. As always a new technique opens up a whole world of possible new discoveries. This sort of fossilization is very rare, but now that they know the hat to look for we should be finding more than a few other examples.
Surprise! Fossils in a flash
Scientists sometimes make the error of a hasty generalization. It was thought that one cannot preserve organs, but with the help of specific bacteria the impossible becomes possible.
"In rock after rock, Martill didn’t just find a skeleton of the fish. He also found its organs petrified in stone. He found the stomach, intestines and the delicate feather-like gills that the fish used to breathe. In the stomach of one fish, Martill even found the petrified remains of its last meal: the bodies of shrimpy creatures called ostracods. And when he looked closely at the fossil gills under a microscope, he realized that even individual cells had been preserved."
Just a teaser, it goes into how they discovered it was a bacteria that made this possible. As always a new technique opens up a whole world of possible new discoveries. This sort of fossilization is very rare, but now that they know the hat to look for we should be finding more than a few other examples.