It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once seen done from the ink of a
fossil Belemnite that must have perished and become fossilized millions of years ago.
These plains, however, had not always been equally destitute of wood, as was evident from the trunks of the trees which the travellers repeatedly met with, some still standing, others lying about in broken fragments, but all in a
fossil state, having flourished in times long past.
I say, that when a man endures patiently what ought to be unendurable, he is a
fossil."
Consequently evidence of their former existence could be found only amongst fossil remains, which are preserved, as we shall in a future chapter attempt to show, in an extremely imperfect and intermittent record.
Hence the chance of discovering species with transitional grades of structure in a fossil condition will always be less, from their having existed in lesser numbers, than in the case of species with fully developed structures.
Amongst existing Vertebrata, we find but a small amount of gradation in the structure of the eye, and from fossil species we can learn nothing on this head.
We told him not to be afraid, but to speak the plain truth: Was it the
fossil of a pre-Adamite whale, or was it an early Roman coffin?
UNIQUE: Mohammed al-Thani, a recent Business Graduate from CNA-Q, has a unique hobby of collecting
fossils. Photo by Umer Nangiana
Hunting for
fossils and bones is one of the National Trust's '50 things to do before you're 11 3/4'.
Most
fossils are excavated from sedimentary rock layers (rock that has formed from sediment, such as sand, mud, and small pieces of rock).
"Plant
Fossils" is an exciting title in a new juvenile series about paleobotany and paleontology: analyzing plant
fossils to discover details about conditions on Earth millions of years ago.