What are trace fossils?

As the words suggest, trace fossils are fossil traces that have left organisms, many ancient and disappeared. The oldest comes from Twitya formation in Northwest Canada, dated 610 million years ago. Within the paleontology, they are a formal name for trace fossils of ichnofosily, from the Greek ichno , which means "hitchhiking" or "trace". Trace fossils are found in sedimentary rock and dated by examining the conditions of isotopes of zircons built into the same layer.

Although trace fossils may not be as fantastic as known fossils, they are much easier to find and are much easier to find and provide a key reference point for the behavior and anatomy of organisms. On the other hand, many trace fossils may have ambiguous origin, with thousands of organisms that are unidentified. In these circumstances, scientists have to settle for educated estimates and debate. There are everyone, hitchhiking of fossils of housing structures, like the underground chambers; FODIN, three -dimensional withanimals that are played by a sediment for food such as worms; Pascichnia, feeding tracks left by surface organisms; Cubes, leaving organisms resting on soft sediments; And repair, surface traces of organisms are crawling over the surface.

Fossil trace can provide us with important information that other fossils cannot. For example, there are land tracks called climactichnits , left by a large animal, which dates back to 510 million years ago, in the Cambrian era. This is quite strange, because the earliest fossils of animals breathing air-indicated by respiratory openings-stretch up to only 428 million years. Was there really life on Earth up to Cambrian, or maybe life adapted to short points on the ground, such as walking between tidal pools? Perhaps these animals have so soft and fragile that they disintegrated before they left fossilse bodies. Without trace fossils, we would have to rely solely on the fossils of the body to determine when the first organisms got on the ground.

Some of the most amazing trace fossils will leave Eupterids, giant sea scorpions as large as small cars. There are also newer trace fossils, such as human tracks for only a few million years, which remained early homonides by passengers over the volcanic ash in Tanzania.