Re: what is a fossil

[Office <dinosaur@interport.net>]

There is a kind of vagueness to the idea of "preservation" and age that
is not satisfying in a fossil definition.

For example, in most sea-shore gift shops, one can purchase sea-shells
encased in a block of some form of clear acrylic plastic.

Is that a fossil?

By the logic of almost all of the definitions presented, it is....

ES


Andrea Spreafico wrote:
> 
> At 14.12 21/06/97 -0500, Sam J. Hogan wrote:
> 
> >Unless you carefully define  "fossilization",  this sounds like circular
> >definition to me:
> >1.  Fossil:  an artifact resulting from the process of fossilization
> >2.  Fossilization:  the process of producing a fossil
> 
> The above definitions are circular; but the main part of the definition in
> my message is "everything remains of animal and vegetal organisms that lived
> in the past geological times"; then it's specified that they are mantained
> up today because of physical-chemical processes: these are referred to
> several ways of mineralization, incrustation, carbonification, distillation,
> inclusion in amber, etc., as a whole called "fossilization".
> 
> At 00.10 24/06/97 -0700, Betty Cunningham wrote:
> 
> >then this might not include some of our own extinct hominid ancestors?
> >The need to have them in "past geological times"
> 
> >What of hybrids or cladistic descendants of things where the last parent
> >is now extinct but this is still recent?
> >If you found a quagga (perhaps mummified in the Sahara) would this be a
> >fossil?
> >If not a fossil then what would you clasify the remains as?
> >Perhaps in terms of archeological nomenclature rather than GEOLOGICAL?
> 
> If we consider the age of an organism (or of a track), the question is how
> much it must be old to be defined as fossil, and this may pose some
> problems. If we refer to past geological times we exclude holocene, so every
> dead organism from 10.000 years ago up today is not defined as a fossil: in
> this case bivalves that are found in Miocene layers are fossils, but
> individuals of the same species found dead in a roman-age-site or in a 5000
> y.a.-layer are not. The same applies also to organisms that become extinct
> in historical ages.
> I agree that also this kind of definition lets some gap and could unsatisfy
> some points of view. I only say that I prefer it to the definition n. 1
> reported by Bonnie Blackwell.
> 
> Eugenio Spreafico

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