Fossil Fun Facts For All The Dino Lovers

• Who didn’t like dinosaurs as a kid? These fossil fun facts are for all the dino lovers. 

If you liked dinosaurs as a kid, or hell, if you still do, then these are all the fossil fun facts for you.

• Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of ancient life forms. 
• All sorts of living things, from land to animals can form fossils.
• It’s the job of paleontologists to study fossils so we can learn more about the history of life on Earth.
• Complete dinosaur skeletons are rarely found. Most museum
• versions are copies of real fossils. 
• Dinosaur bones are some of the biggest fossils around. 
• Bones aren’t the only types of fossils that paleontologists find. Did you know this about fossil fun facts?
• Fossils form in different ways and provide clues to what life was like long ago. 
• The word “petrify” means to turn into stone. 
• Petrified means that minerals fill in the spaces in the hard parts and sometimes even replace the original tissues. 
• What remains are the fossils of the body parts of the animal or plant which have hardened into rock. 
• Most fossils are petrified.
• Mold fossils are impressions or outlines of once living things left behind in rocks. 
• Sometimes a plant or animal dies and lands in sediment. The mud or sand then hardens around the creature and its body decays. What remains is the hollow space left behind by the plant or animal. If minerals fill this mold fossil, they can harden into a cast. A cast fossil looks like an exact copy of the original organism. 
• A piece of fossilized poop is called a coprolite.
• Trace fossils can reveal what animals ate, where they traveled, and how they reproduced. 
• Footprints or a trail in the mud by a dinosaur dragging its tail are examples of trace fossils. 
• Preserved nests, eggshells, underground burrows, and fossilized poop are trace fossils, too. 
• Trace fossils form through petrification when an impression left in sediment hardens into rock. These fossil fun facts are full of science. Are you learning a lot?
• Fossils can tell scientists how ancient animals behaved.
• Small animals, such as insects, can get stuck and trapped in sticky liquid. Over time, that resin can harden into amber, fossilized tree resin, preserving the animal’s body inside. 
• Larger animals like mammoths and saber-toothed cats became trapped in a similar way. Because tar is oily and gooey, it seeps up from the underground and can preserve an animal’s bones without changing them into stone. 
• A frozen baby wooly mammoth was found completely frozen in Russia. They named her Lyuba and she was alive 42,000 years ago. Her skin, trunk, fur, and organs were almost all perfectly preserved.
• Scientists have found frozen bison, caribou, wolves, and humans that are thousands of years old. 
• Fossils have been found on every continent, even Antarctica.
• The Mammoth Site in South Dakota has the greatest number of mammoth fossils in the world. 
• Paleontologists visit areas with sedimentary rock to find fossils. These are the fossil fun facts we need so that we can look for fossils. 
• Fossils often just look like regular rocks.
• Fossil beds can be found all over the world.  
• Fossil shells are often found among rocks along England’s Jurassic Coast. 
• A T. rex skeleton contains about 380 bones.
• The word “fossil” comes from the Latin word fossils. It means “dug up.”
• The largest dinosaur fossil footprint is as long as an adult human. 
• Fossils have been found on every continent on Earth.
• X-rays of fossil dinosaur eggs have revealed babies that had been developing inside.
• Fossil shells have been found on top of Mount Everest, revealing that its rocks were once beneath an ocean. 
• If you identify a new type of fossil plant or animal, you get to name it.
• The word “dinosaur” comes from the Greek words meaning “terrible lizard.” This is one of the most interesting fossil fun facts.
• When David Shiffler was 9 years old, he became the youngest person to find a fossil. Even cooler, when he was three years old, he discovered a piece of a dinosaur eggshell. This is the coolest of fossil fun facts and finds, especially as a kid. 
• The most common fossils are those of underwater creatures with hard shells.
• Preserved remains need to be at least 10,000 years old to be considered a fossil. 
• The oldest fossils are stromatolites. These mounds are the remains of large numbers of microbes that grew together. 
• Fossils found in lower layers are older than those in rock layers above.

What do you think of these fossil fun facts? Do you want to see more articles like this?