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Fossils ?
- Thread starter twinc
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Mikecpking
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Any fossil would have to buried quickly in sediment to prevent bones from being weathered away, or the carcass being eaten etc.
Depending on the type of fossils, some entire rock formations like chalk and limestone are entirely made of fossilised life. There is no burial process, but the accumulation of the calcerous left-overs on the sea floor.
Coal is, if you like, fossilised peat and very often find fossils of tree leaves and fern frond impressions in the alternating sandstone deposits either side of the measures.
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so then are the Cambrian fossils,a sudden appearance,all at once and fully formed or a sudden disappearance,all at once fully formed - twinc
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They must be buried shorty after death to prevent decomposition. It must be a tightly compacted substrate to prevent too much air from reaching it. They then believe the substrate hardens into stone and the bones dissolve. Minerals slowly crystallize inside this mold.
Others theories are basically the same but some the minerals seep into the bone and crystallize inside the cellular structure of the bone and the bone slowly dissolves around it.
The Learning Zone: What is a fossil?
How are Fossils Formed?
So no, no real fossil is composed of bone any longer, just minerals from the surrounding earth, yet they claim to date them by the carbon 14 conveniently left from the bone and not added or subtracted to by the incoming minerals that crystallize. Go figure.
Which is why they really don't want to discuss how they are formed, as you noticed by the first few answers.
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There are different kinds of fossils. Here is an example of one kind from Wiki:
"Permineralization is a process of fossilization that occurs when an organism is buried. The empty spaces within an organism (spaces filled with liquid or gas during life) become filled with mineral-rich groundwater. Minerals precipitate from the groundwater, occupying the empty spaces. This process can occur in very small spaces, such as within the cell wall of a plant cell. Small scale permineralization can produce very detailed fossils. For permineralization to occur, the organism must become covered by sediment soon after death or soon after the initial decay process. The degree to which the remains are decayed when covered determines the later details of the fossil. Some fossils consist only of skeletal remains or teeth; other fossils contain traces of skin, feathers or even soft tissues. This is a form ofdiagenesis."
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Click on the 
Split Rock
Conflation of Blathers
Who claims to be able to date fossilized bone with C14 dating? I call shenanigans.
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TheBeardedDude
The Fossil Dude(tm)
A fossil is any evidence of past life. So, traces (like footprints and burrows) are fossils too.
In order to get a fossil you need, an organism + sediment + time
The ideal case would be rapid burial before decomposition. This could mean that burial could be the cause of death (like for the Burgess Shale faunas that were swept up in an underwater landslide and deposited downslope), or freezing (like with some mammoths), or perhaps even burial under volcanic debris (like the town of Hercules at the base of Vesuvius).
The point of rapid burial via sediment or ash (or freezing them) is to prevent decomposition and/or scattering of organic debris. But you can also get excellent preservation without rapid burial. You can get that in places of low decomposition. So, swamps would be one for coal deposits where the waters are low in oxygen and therefore low in bacterial life that generate decomposition, so you accumulate a lot of organic matter that doesn't decompose and continues to compact itself under its own weight. Or you can get high quality fossils in other places of low oxygen, like the Solenhofen limestone (the famous Archaeopteryx came from that). This was a shallow and warm freshwater lake that became periodically anoxic. Meaning that if something fell in it and died, there was not enough oxygen to sustain bacteria for decomposition. Same thing with the Green River Shale in Wyoming too. Periodically becomes anoxic, and the fish in it die and leave behind excellent fossils (the fish fossils in a light tannish flat stone that you have almost certainly seen in gift shops).
There are also numerous other ways to get less high-quality fossils than those above. Like footprints even. The dinosaur trackways here in Connecticut are not the result of any rapid burial. They are the result of dinosaurs walking along flood plains and the water rising shortly after they passed through and filling the footprints in with sediment and wham...fossil.
Or gastroliths. Gastroliths are stomach stones that some organisms used (like chickens) for aiding in digestion of plant debris. They swallow rocks and these rocks roll around in the stomach helping to crush material (and they become quite smooth and highly polished due to the acidic nature of the digestive system). You have 2 ways to get rid of them and place them in the rock record. 1 is for the organism to die with them in its stomach to be buried and fossilized and 2 is feces. And you do indeed find fossilized poop (called a coprolite) and species that use gastroliths can and do leave gastroliths in them from time to time. (A lot of herbivorous dinosaurs used gastroliths and quite a few birds do too.)
Some materials like the shells of clams, ammonites, brachiopods, etc...don't require as rapid of burial. Their shells are quite robust and resistant. Meaning that they can hang about on the surface for a while. The soft parts decay away but the shell just sits there like a pebble. Go to the beach and look through the sand and you will surely find that most of it is broken-up shells. Go to the gulf coast and you will find the beaches have some layers of dense shell beds separated by layers of sediment. These are storm deposits where all of the poor little bivalves out in the shallows were swept up during the storm and deposited as layers of shell hash. (we find these in the deep past periodically too).
And then (as others have noted) some rocks are composed almost entirely of fossils (like the shell has I just mentioned) but at the micro and/or nano scale. Like some cherts are all radiolarians. Most limestones are either shell material in some form, or the deposition of the calcaerous cement that formed the limestone was biologically mediated through chemical processes in the ocean.
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after,all else is said and done ad infinitum and ad absurdum ,the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of fossils are found,as if suddenly buried in sedimentary rock layers laid down by water all over the earth = 75% of the earths surface - twinc
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TheBeardedDude
The Fossil Dude(tm)
How did you arrive at that?
I make a living thanks to fossils. I collect fossils. I have never seen anything in the field to corroborate your assertion of the majority being being "suddenly" buried.
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TheBeardedDude
The Fossil Dude(tm)
If you didn't actually want to learn about fossils, don't mask it under the guise of genuine interest you troll.
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I would be interested to know how many real fossils as a rule,like human fossils or donosaur fossils you have found just lying around that you have been lucky to stumble across - twinc
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