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Chapter 1: The nature of fossils
A fossil is any kind of remains, or trace of a former life. The word fossil comes from the Latin fossilis, meaning ‘something dug out of the ground’.
The ancient Greeks were the first people to record a knowledge of fossils, but their ideas were lost for two thousand
years. Fossils had to be
re-discovered as former
life forms. Leonardo
da Vinci, for example,
was one of the first to
re-discover fossils in
rocks and to see in them
ancient sea creatures that had been buried before the muds and sands turned to stone.
Over the following centuries more and
more was discovered about fossils, and this eventually led to their central role in our knowledge of what the earth was like in the past (see Chapter 2).
(Below) This fossil belemnite shows how careful we need to be about what is interpreted from the fossil we find. The diagram below shows that the fossil is only the hard part of a much larger animal.
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(Below) Some rocks prove to be rich in past forms of life. These rocks contain ammonites.