the.com/fossil
a corpse that stuck around long enough to become a celebrity
means the preserved remains or impression of a once-living thing, turned to stone over vast stretches of time — or, by extension, a person or idea hopelessly out of date.
from From Latin fossilis, "dug up," from fodere, "to dig." It entered English in the 1600s meaning anything excavated from the earth — minerals, oddities, curiosities — before it narrowed to mean the stony ghosts of ancient life. So at heart, a fossil is simply "a thing that was dug up," and fodere is also the digging-cousin behind words like fosse, the moat-ditch around a fort.
- slow swap
- Minerals replace bone atom by atom over millennia
- odds
- Less than one percent of life ever fossilizes
- fuel too
- Coal and oil are fossils you set on fire
- soft stuff
- Some preserve feathers, skin, even stomach contents
- living kind
- Coelacanths survived 66 million years past their fossils
lucy skeleton — 3.2 million year old australopithecus afarensis found in ethiopia, 1974
tiktaalik — 375 million year old transitional species between fish and tetrapods, found in nunavut, 2004
archaeopteryx — 150 million year old berlin specimen showing feathered dinosaur-bird link, munich museum